Staff Profile

Professor Andrea Noble, BA Cantab, PhD Birmingham

Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Telephone: +44 (0) 191 33 43434

Room number: A40, Elvet Riverside I

Member of the Durham Centre for Advanced Photography Studies

Biography

Andrea Noble is a Latin Americanist with research interests in visual culture studies -- particularly film and photography -- and Mexican cultural history. Her work to date has engaged with a range of methodological approaches, including those derived from feminist and gender studies, cultural memory, history of the emotions, reception and spectatorship, semiotics, and visual anthropology. There are two strands to her current research and writing projects:

The first is provisionally called 'Tears in Mexico: A cultural History of Emotions and Motivations' and explores public acts of weeping in Mexico, ranging from 'la noche triste', when Hernán Cortés, fleeing from the Aztecs, is supposed to have sat down under an ahuehuete tree and wept, through the extravagant tears that Pancho Villa shed beside the tomb of Francisco Madero in December 1914. By homing in on emblematic moments of weeping, the aim is to probe the 'feeling rules' in operation at given historical moments, raising questions related to power, gender, class, morality, etc. This project has been funded by a Marie Curie Outgoing Fellowship (2013-2015) and will involve two years based at the Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

The second explores the relationship between visual culture and social movements and conflict in Latin America. This research focuses on areas such as the status of the photo opportunity on behalf of human rights, and the role of the visual media in the so-called war on drugs in Mexico. It is concerned with the political, aesthetic and emotional work performed by such visual images as they circulate in the global iconosphere. This project is part of a wider collaborative network with colleagues from the Toronto Photography Seminar (http://www.torontophotoseminar.org/) and has been funded by a 2-year AHRC network grant (2012-2014).

Postgraduate Supervision: Andrea is keen to supervise most topics within the general fields of her research interests. Topics she has supervised or is currently supervising include: the cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa; photography and the memory of political violence in Argentina and Peru; photography, women and war in the Americas; photography, race and visual rights; representations of the other in documentary media in France; masculinity and violence in 'golden-age' Mexican cinema.

Public Engagement : Andrea has spoken about her research on film and photography across a range of public venues and media, including Cornerhouse (Manchester); the British Musuem; The Royal Court; The Photographers' Gallery; Impressions Gallery, The British Academy, the Fototeca Nacional and BBC Radio 3. In March 2012 she was selected to participate as a jury member on the panel to select the best Ibero-American feature film at Latin America's premier Festival Internacional de Cine de Guadalajara (http://www.ficg.mx/).

Research Groups

School of Modern Languages and Cultures

Culture and Difference
Literature/History/Theory
Visual and Performance

Selected Publications

Books: authored

Noble, A. (2010). Photography and Memory in Mexico: Icons of Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Noble, Andrea. (2005). Mexican National Cinema. London, New York: Routledge.
Noble Andrea (2000). Tina Modotti: Image, Texture, Photography. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Books: edited

Long, J. J., Noble, Andrea. & Welch, Edward. (2008). Photography: Theoretical Snapshots. London: Routledge.
Noble, A & Hughes, A (2003). Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Essays in edited volumes

Noble, Andrea (2013). The Politics of Emotion in the Mexican Revolution: The Tears of Pancho Villa. In Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect. Kantaris, Geoffrey & O'Bryen, Rory Tamesis.
Young, Richard & Holmes, Amanda (2010). Zapatistas in Mexico City and the Performance of Ethnic Citizenship. In Cultures of the City: Mediating Identities in Urban Latino/o America. Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press. 183-198.
Noble, Andrea (2009). Family Photography and the Global Drama of Human Rights. In Photography: Theoretical Snapshots. Long, Jonathan, Noble, Andrea & Welch, Edward Routledge. 63-79.
Noble, Andrea. (2006). If Looks Could Kill: Image Wars in María Candelaria. In Screening World Cinema: A Screen Reader. Catherine Grant. & Annette Kuhn. London: Routledge. 72-85.
Noble, Andrea. (2005). Photography, Memory, Disavowal: the Casasola Archive. In Images of power: Iconography, Culture and the State in Latin America. Andermann, J. & Rowe, W. New York Oxford: Berghahn Books. 195-216.

Journal papers: academic

(2011). El llanto de Pancho Villa. Archivos de la Filmoteca 68: 39-59.
Andrea Noble (2010). Recognizing Historical Injustice through Photography: Mexico 1968. Theory, Culture & Society 27(7-8): 184-213.
Noble, A. (2008). Travelling Theories of Family Photography and the Material Culture of Human Rights in Latin America. Journal of Romance Studies 8(1): 43-59.
Noble, Andrea. (2006). Seeing through ¡Que viva Mexico!: Eisenstein's Travels in Mexico. Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 12(2-3): 173-187.
(2006). Vino todo el pueblo: Notes on Monsiváis, Mexican Movies and Movie-Going. Bulletin of Latin American Research 25(4): 506-511.
Noble, Andrea. (2004). Visual Culture and Latin American Studies. The New Centennial Review 4(2): 219-238.

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Media Contacts

Available for media contact about:

Visual culture: Mexican Revolution
Language, Literature & the Arts: Mexican film and photography