WILLIAM BROWN (Assistant Professor of Film, D.Phil. University of Oxford). William joined UBC from the University of Roehampton, London, in January 2022, having previously taught at the University of St Andrews, the University of Oxford and New York University Abu Dhabi. He is both a scholar and a maker of films, with work spanning fiction, documentary, the video-essay and hybrids of all three.

His current research focuses primarily on film-philosophy, digital media, posthumanism and critical race theory. His latest monograph, Navigating from the White Anthropocene to the Black Chthulucene was published in 2023 with Zer0 Books, while his previous books include: Moving People, Moving Images: Cinema and Trafficking in the New Europe (with Dina Iordanova and Leshu Torchin, College Gate Press, 2010); Deleuze and Film (co-edited with David Martin-Jones, Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Supercinema: Film-Philosophy for the Digital Age (Berghahn, 2013); Non-Cinema: Global Digital Filmmaking and the Multitude (Bloomsbury, 2018; nominated by the British Association of Film and Television Studies Society for Best Monograph of 2018); and The Squid Cinema from Hell: Kinoteuthis Infernalis and the Emergence of Chthulumedia (with David H. Fleming, Edinburgh University Press, 2020). He has published over 100 further essays in journals and edited collections, while also being the book reviews editor of Studies in European Cinema and Film-Philosophy, and the conference report editor of Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image.

As of 2023, William has made some 15 no-budget feature films, including En Attendant Godard (one of esteemed film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Top Five Films of 2009), Afterimages (Sight & Sound Films of the Year, 2010), Common Ground (American Online Film Awards 2014), Selfie (2014), Circle/Line (East End Film Festival, 2017) and This is Cinema, which premiered in 2021 at the IndieCork Film Festival in Ireland. His feature-length essay-film, #randomaccessmemory, was named among the Sight & Sound Video-Essays of the Year in 2018, while his short, Golden Gate, was among the Sight & Sound Video-Essays of the Year in 2020. His video-essays and essay-films have been published in [in]Transition, Screenworks and Annals of Cross Cuts.

William has been a keynote speaker at various conferences and symposia in Europe, Asia and the Americas, while also giving numerous talks about his filmmaking practice at festivals and universities across the world. He has spoken several times at the Cinematheque and the Vancouver International Film Festival, having also been a regular speaker at the British Film Institute, especially as part of their Philosophical Screens series. His teaching includes both film production and film history/theory, and before joining UBC he supervised to successful completion five PhD dissertations, four of which combine practice and theory.