John is a lecturer in Screen & Performance at the University of the West of Scotland. With a focus on popular film and television, John’s recent publications have explored professional wrestling as an intersection between transmedia storytelling and high concept cinema, offered multimodal discourse analysis as a means of understanding the abstracted relations that pervade and sculpt sports entertainment, and analysed fan curation of the Alien cinematic mythos via morphogenetic YouTube paratexts. John’s forthcoming publications focus on representations of masculinity, exploring the restorative processes of nostalgia that re-establish a continuity of heteronormative masculine identification with the Star Wars universe via The Mandalorian, situating the Deadpool cinematic franchise as an expression of the complex ‘crisis’ of masculinity, correlating ideational populism with the aesthetics of masculinity in Joker (2019), analysing the intersection of gendered demagogues and the eighties action cinema, and examining the supergendered modes of masculinity at play in Avengers: Endgame (2019).

In addition to his primary research, John also has a keen interest in teaching, learning and assessment, and has a secondary research area exploring innovative pedagogies in higher education. John’s recent research in this area, externally funded by the Innovation and Development Fund of the Scottish Library and Information Council, focused on challenging traditional educational hierarchies. Recent reports and papers from this project have proposed methodologies for improving information literacy engagement via student-led non-hierarchical collaborative learning activities.

John's current research focuses on the notion of masculinity in superhero cinema, and the paratextual ecosystem surrounding ‘drillable’ cinematic franchises.

John’s forthcoming publications explore:

• Tragic Masculinities and Craig Mazin's Chernobyl

• Gendering, Ideational Populism and the Eighties Action Cinema

• Supergendered modes of representation in Avengers: Endgame (2019)

• Popular Film & Television 
• Assessment in Higher Education