Film Studies Departmental Speaker Series -- From Eyebrows to Scousebrows

Dr Niamh Thornton (University of Liverpool) and Dr Liz Greene (Liverpool John Moores University) will be sharing their work from their fantastic “Brews and Brows” project” – abstract below. The event will take place virtually on Teams, and everyone is welcome – please join using the attached link.

Brews and Brows: Shaping Stories from Eyebrows to Scousebrows is an interdisciplinary project working across the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences and Sciences. The team consists of researchers in Film Studies, Filmmaking, Human Geography, Facial Scanning, and Fashion Photography, and has worked with scholars in Queer Studies, Art Practice, Evolutionary Archeology, Brow Artists and Technicians, and Cosmetic Surgery.

The project started with a set of questions firmly placed in Film Studies, how do actors act with their eyebrows and how do they communicate to us the audience? These questions were subsequently expanded upon and broadened out to raise questions of identity – class, gender, race, age and sexual orientation in Liverpool, a city marked (and denigrated) by a specific eyebrow, the Scousebrow.

We invited the general public to join us for a "brew" and chat about their brows. For this, the project trained 6 PhD students in interdisciplinary methods, held an event and symposium at FACT, Liverpool and a subsequent event during the Homotopia Festival at the Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool. The project received funding from Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), the University of Liverpool (UoL), the AHRC North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership, engage@Liverpool, Methods Northwest, and the ESRC.

This presentation by Dr Niamh Thornton (Modern Languages and Cultures, UoL) and Dr Liz Greene (Liverpool Screen School, LJMU) will discuss some of the initial findings from the project.