Carleigh Morgan

Carleigh is currently adapting her doctoral thesis—‘Work in Motion: Labour and Aesthetic Production in the Animated Film Industry’—into a monograph. She is currently undertaking revisions for an article entitled ‘Camera Work: Photography and the Automation of Animation in Winsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal and writing a chapter for the edited collection Virtual Production: What’s Real? due to be published by Routledge. In addition to speaking at conferences both nationally and internationally, Carleigh has worked as a film curator, engaged her research practice through exhibition of creative works, and has appeared on BBC Radio 1.

Diagramming the intersections between representations of work and the work of representation, Carleigh’s doctoral thesis tracked how animation has historically mediated technological transformations in film production through self-reflexive engagements with the process of animated filmmaking. Her thesis argued that animation’s distinctive turn towards self-reflexivity does not vanish with the disappearance of the animator from the frame: rather, animation enduringly works through tensions between autonomy and automation; movement and mechanisation; labour and alienation at moments of significant historical transition and technological transformation in filmmaking. This work offers incisive interventions into the technology, history, and historiography of film and raises important questions for film studies about its relationship to animation and media theory in the digital age.

Her master’s thesis— a media philosophy of glitch as an aesthetic recuperation of technological failure— earned a Distinction from King’s College London and laid the groundwork for a constellation of subsidiary research interests, which include cybernetic literature and video games; internet cultures and subcultures; hierarchies and networks of digital production; and internet aesthetics.   

Carleigh joined the University of Birmingham in September 2023 as Assistant Professor of Film. This year she secured funding with B-Film to launch ‘Medium and Materiality, a programme of events and invited speakers which attends to the materiality of film as a mutable, ambivalent object owing to the transformations in and re-negotiations among film, digital technologies, and new media. 

Prior to joining the University of Birmingham, Carleigh was a doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge in Film and Screen Studies, where she completed a doctoral thesis entitled ‘Work in Motion: Labour and Aesthetic Production in the Animated Film Industry’ in 2023. During her time as a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, she created and convened the cross-institutional reading group ‘Body Politics: Critical Theories of Reproductive Justice.’ An active participant in CRASSH symposia and workshops, in 2021 she was awarded a Methods Fellowship by Cambridge Digital Humanities to lead a series of workshops on transparency in digital culture. These workshops explored how the demand for more transparency—in algorithms, computational systems, and culture more broadly—encode certain assumptions about the emancipatory capacity of representation. Drawing on a combination of artworks, historical texts, cultural touchstones, and moving images, these workshops gave participants an opportunity to attend to transparency’s complex configurations within contemporary culture through a media theoretical lens. Carleigh’s interest in reproductive justice and feminist liberation led her to join Cambridge Reproduction, a cross-departmental research initiative dedicated to exploring issues, theories, and approaches to reproductive healthcare, technology, and justice. Carleigh worked closely with Cambridge Reproduction as a Steering Committee Postgraduate Representative; Seminar Series Co-coordinator; and as an executive member of the Incubator Fund Evaluation Committee.

As a postgraduate student at King’s College London, Carleigh competed a Master’s in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory: her thesis examined the phenomenon of data moshing, adopting a critical theorisation of the aesthetics of failure in digital media. While at KCL, she was awarded LAHP funding to lead a range of workshops on research communication, publication, and public engagement for early career researchers. She also worked as the Research Administrator for King’s College London’s Centre for Digital Culture from 2015-2016. She graduated with distinction from Wake Forest University in 2012 with a BA in Philosophy and BA in English Literature, receiving honours for the competition of an optional dissertation on the iconography of Japanese Noh and its influence on the metaphysical world-building of WB Yeats’ stage play Purgatory.