Carleigh Morgan

Digital technologies present creative possibilities and theoretical provocations for film and media studies, demanding the dismantling of strict boundaries between disciplines. My work embraces this challenge. I explore how developments in AI, virtual production, and digital media are reshaping production practices in film, television, and visual arts. I examine how labourers in behind-the-scenes contexts like animation, digital effects, voice acting, and screen performance are mediated by technology and reconfigured by the globalisation of film production practices across digitally distributed infrastructures. My work investigates the connection between representations of work and the work of representation to diagram how digital technologies impact creative labour onscreen and off, at the level of screen aesthetics and labour relations in the film and media industries. In addition to speaking at academic conferences in the UK and internationally, I have worked as a film curator, exhibited creative projects, and appeared on BBC Radio 1.

In July 2023, I completed my doctorate in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge with full funding from Trinity College. My thesis, Work in Motion: Labour and Aesthetic Production in the Animated Film Industry, argued that animated films screen labour as their subject matter at historical moments when the handicraft of animation is revolutionised by automation, thereby raising key questions about the relationship between film and technology. I am adapting this work for publication as a monograph, with interest from Palgrave in publishing it under their Animation series. An excerpt of this thesis has been accepted for publication in Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal with the title ‘Camera Work: Photography and the Automation of Animation in Winsor McKay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)’.

I am currently writing a chapter for an edited collection called Unspool: Critical Time Loops in Screen Media, under contract with Edinburgh University Press for publication in 2026. My contribution—‘Past Speculation: The Role of Reenactment in Anatomy of a Fall (2023)’—explores how visual effects achieved through computer animation structure the film according to the logics of digital time: physical and virtual re-enactments structure the film like a series of iterating feedback loops. I recently completed an article about computation and aesthetics in the creation of crowd simulations in the global vfx industry, and I delivered a talk based on this work for the 2025 conference of the British Association of Film and Screen Studies (BAFTSS).

After completing a PhD in Film and Screen Studies at Cambridge, I joined the University of Birmingham in September 2023 as an Assistant Professor working in the Department of Film and Creative Writing. Whilst at Birmingham, I have designed brand new curricula and shaped new and existing undergraduate and postgraduate programmes across arts, humanities, and social sciences. My expertise features on joint degree programmes in Film and Creative Writing; Digital Media and Communications; English Literature; Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences; and Linguistics. I collaboratively teach foundation modules like Introduction to Film: Styles and Forms; Film Genre; and Film Theory and Criticism, and Adaptation Studies, in addition to convening original modules like Screen Histories and Futures and AI in Language and Digital Media. My roles as Student Staff Liaison and Student Experience Lead testify to my strengths in balancing teaching with leadership and departmental governance, and I'm honoured to be shortlisted for Outstanding Staff Support 2025.

With grants from the Alumni Impact Fund and the Collaborative Research Internship, I worked with the Cadbury Research Library to train students in archival best practice and began digitising over 5,000 analogue tapes from the university’s former Film and TV Unit—a rich repository of cinematic, cultural, and intellectual history. The Vice-Chancellor was ‘genuinely excited’ about this work, and some rediscovered footage—including a previously unseen royal visit—will feature in the university’s 125th-anniversary celebrations. As a result, I’ve increased access to these archives for use by researchers and creative practitioners and empowered students to develop skills for future employment in creative and cultural sectors. As Programme Lead for the Film and Media strand of Birmingham International Summer School, I’ve mentored ECRS and guided them in creating a research-led teaching programme aimed at international students on diverse educational pathways. And with funding from B-Film I launched ‘Medium and Materiality, a programme of events with invited speakers that strengthens connections with other UK universities through cross-institutional inquiry into the material dimensions of digital media.

At Cambridge, I taught Comparative European Cinema, supervised undergraduate students in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages and Linguistics, and supervised a postgraduate dissertation on the history of anime. Through a Methods Fellowship with Cambridge Digital Humanities, I developed a research strand around digital opacity and the visual cultures of algorithmic ‘unboxing’. My project, ‘Against Transparency’, examined how calls for algorithmic openness often aestheticise legibility in ways that re-inscribe the black-box logic of algorithmic systems. This work was complemented by my involvement in experimental and collaborative projects like Machine Feeling, a year-long knowledge-exchange partnership between Cambridge University and Aarhus University, wherein I explored the role of the digital interface in surfacing the technological failure of algorithmic processes. I presented this work on glitch at the transmediale festival in Berlin, engaging with an international audience of artists and scholars working at the intersection of media theory, artistry, and creative practice-as-research. My personal commitments to reproductive justice led me to Cambridge Reproduction, a cross-departmental research initiative dedicated to exploring issues, theories, and approaches to reproductive healthcare, technology, and justice. I 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, I earned an MA with Distinction in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory. My thesis examined glitch aesthetics in contemporary screen media: glitches are visual representations of an underlying technological failure, except when the glitch itself becomes a desirable—and surface-level—aesthetic form. I was awarded LAHP funding to lead a range of workshops on research communication, publication, and public engagement for early career researchers and worked as the Research Administrator for King’s College London’s Centre for Digital Culture from 2015-2016.

I graduated from Wake Forest University in 2012 with a BA in Philosophy; BA in English Literature (Honours); and a minor in French Studies.