John Quinn

Dr John Quinn is a lecturer in Screen and Performance at the University of the West of Scotland. Working within the division of Arts & Media, John’s research explores the narratives and cultural politics of popular culture. With a particular focus on popular film and television, John’s recent publications have explored professional wrestling as an intersection between transmedia storytelling and high concept cinema, and offered multimodal discourse analysis as a means of understanding the abstracted relations that pervade and sculpt sports entertainment. 

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 projects continue his exploration of sports entertainment, demonstrating how the paratexts of professional wrestling function to disrupt traditional textual hierarchies to simultaneously configure, and be configured by, consumer experiences, and branch out into the analysis of genre cinema to explore notions of hegemonic masculinity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, establishing how such masculinities interact with the aesthetics of the supergendered to reinforce and valorise traditional gender roles and behaviours.

John's forthcoming research projects include:

• Liminal Space & Claustrophobia in the works of John Carpenter  
• Beyond the Space Jockey: Liminal Paratexts in the Alien Universe 
• Keeping it Simple: Exposition, Set Pieces and the Spectacle of the Supergendered Ideal in Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw

• Popular Film & Television 
• Assessment in Higher Education