Dr Saige Walton

Saige Walton is a Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies and one of the Associate Directors of the Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) research centre, based in UniSA Creative.

She is a film and visual culture studies scholar who works in American, European and World Cinema contexts. She is particularly interested in issues relating to screen aesthetics and the body, often using phenomenological philosophy as well as other film-philosophical frameworks to help make 'sense' of the cinema. She also teaches and conducts research in areas relating to popular film genres, experimental film/media, art and inter-mediality.

Saige's first scholarly monograph - Cinema's Baroque Flesh: Film, Phenomenology and the Art of Entanglement - was published by Amsterdam University Press in 2016 (reviewed in Film-Philosophy; reviewed in Screening the Past; reviewed in Alphaville).  In this book, she explores the parallels between philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's thought, film-phenomenology and the baroque, establishing the baroque as its own distinct cinema of the senses.  You can access a PDF of the Introduction here: Cinema's Baroque Flesh link.

Building on her interest in film and the body, she served as co-editor with Nadine Boljkovac and contributor to the "Materialising Absence in Film and Media" Dossier with Screening the Past (2018). In this Dossier, scholars speak to "the sensuality of what is not there, what might only be implied or suggested ... the materiality of what exists beyond the frame or perhaps at the very limits of representation". You can read the Introduction and access the entire issue here: Materialising Absence in Film and Media link.

Saige's second monograph in progress explores the embodiment and ethics of a contemporary cinema of poetry.  Publications arising from Saige's work on film and the poetic have appeared in leading international journals such as Paragraph and Projections. 

Saige serves as peer reviewer for a wide range of journals and publication houses such as Bloosmbury Publishing, NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Third Text, Film-Philosophy, the New Review of Film and Television Studies, Senses of Cinema and Screening the Past, amongst others.  She is also a member of the Editorial Board for the online journal, MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture.

Prior to joining the University of South Australia in 2012, Saige taught screen, media and cultural studies subjects at the University of Melbourne, Australia.  She is also a former Assistant Curator of Exhibitions with the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne who has helped to curate a number of film programs, exhibitions, screen and art related events for the general public.

• Creative People, Products and Places (CP3) research group, UniSA
• European Network of Film and Media Studies (NECS)
• Australasian Society of Continental Philosophy (ASCP)
• Visiting Research Fellow - Department of Media and Communications, Goldsmiths, University of London (January - April 2014)

Qualifications

• Doctorate of Philosophy Melbourne University

• Bachelor of Arts (Honours) Melbourne University