Photo of Dr Jane Mills Dr Jane Mills

BA (Hons), PhD

Profile

Dr Jane Mills is Associate Professor in Communication (Teaching and Research) at CSU. She's also an honorary Research Fellow at the Australian Film, Television & Radio School (where she was Head of Screen Studies 1995 - 2001), the Series Editor of Australian Screen Classics, co-published by Currency Press and the National Film & Sound Archive, and an Associate Editor and referee for the two Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) journals, Metro and Australian Screen Education.

In addition to consulting, teaching and publishing in screen studies and screen literacy, Jane has a production background in television and documentary film and has written on subjects including cinema, censorship, sex education, socio-linguistics, feminism and human rights. A committed anti-censorship campaigner, she is a founder-member of 'Watch on Censorship'. A frequent broadcaster on television and radio, she's the regular film critic on the 'Philm Phanatics' slot on Simon Marnie's Sunday morning programme on 702 ABC Radio.

Jane is the author of seven books including Loving and Hating Hollywood: Re-framing Global and Local Cinemas (Allen & Unwin, May 2009) and The Money Shot: Cinema, Sin and Censorship (Pluto Press, 2001) Her documentary films include Yilmaz Guney: His life, His Films (Channel 4) on the late Kurdish/Turkish director whose film Yol won the Palme d'or at Cannes, and Rape: That's Entertainment? (BBC1) about the representation of sexual violence towards women in the cinema.

Until she moved to CSU at Bathurst in 2009 Jane was on the NSW Management Committee of Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTaR) and a Board Director of the Sydney Film Festival. Her all-time favourite film changes almost daily but currently is either The Man With A Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) or A Colour Box (Len Lye, 1935).

Back to Staff Listing

Top of page


Teaching

Post-graduate courses and supervision (distance and face-to-face) as well as undergraduate subjects. Jane specialises in visual culture and convergence across a range of subjects including documentary, social media, and other moving image, media and communication topics.

Back to Staff Listing

Top of page


Publications

  • “Hollywood: Bad Cinema's Bad 'Other”, Continuum (forthcoming)
  • “Expanding Horizons: Screen Literacy and Global Citizenship”, Journal of Australian Studies in Japan (forthcoming)
  • “Screen Literacy Learning: Educational Application and Cultural Resistance” in Penny Kinnear with Bev Croker (eds), Interdisciplinary Perspectives: Conversations in Visual Literacies, Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford (forthcoming)
  • “Mapping Australia: Cinematic Cartographies of (Dis)Location”, Senses of Cinema, Issue 55, July 2010
  • “Journey Among Women - Special and Electric-, essay for liner notes in Journey Among Women Collectors edition DVD, Mad Man, 2009
  • “Loving and Hating Hollywood: Re-framing Global and Local Cinemas”, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, May 2009
  • “First Nation Cinema: Hollywood's Indigenous Other”, Screening the Past, No 24, 2009
  • “Phase 2 Cineliteracy Report”, NSW Department of Education and Training Student Services and Equity Programs, 2004
  • “The tools to re-imagine my world: Cineliteracy for High School and Primary School Teachers”, Metro, No 138. 2003
  • “The Concept of the Journey”, NSW English Teachers' Association (ETA) annual student conference. Nov 2003 and published on the NSW ETA website.
  • “The Tarantino Legacy”, Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 36, 2002
  • “Lights! Camera! Paintbrush!” Senses of Cinema 18, Dec-Jan 2002
  • “On the Road with Screen Culture?”, Metro, No 134. 2002
  • Evaluation Report & Case Study'...interest has been sparked,” NSW Department of Education and Training Student Services and Equity Programs, 2002
  • “The Money Shot: Cinema, Sin and Censorship”, Annandale: Pluto Press, 2001
  • “Shooting the medium is not the answer” in Issues in Society: Mass Media and Society, ed. Justin Healey, The Spinney Press, Vol. 130. 2000
  • “Responding to Film” in Curriculum Support for Teaching in English 7-12, Curriculum Support Directorate, vol. 4, no. 3. NSW Department of Education and Training, 2000
As Series Editor
  • Tina Kaufman, Wake In Fright, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA 2010 (forthcoming)
  • Andrew Frost, The Boys, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2010
  • Catharine Lumby, Alvin Purple, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2008
  • Henry Reynolds, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2008
  • Philip Brophy, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2008
  • Tony Moore, The Barry McKenzie Movies, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2005
  • Gail Jones, The Piano, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2007
  • Nell Schofield, Puberty Blues, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2004
  • Adrian Martin, The Mad Max Movies, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2003
  • Louis Nowra, Walkabout, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2003
  • Christos Tsiolkas, The Devil's Playground, Sydney: Currency Press & NFSA, 2003
Keynote lectures and conference papers
  • “?Situating the 'Beyond': Adventure-learning & Indigenous Cultural Competence” (with Dr Barbara Hill), The Fourth World Universities Forum, Hong Kong, (forthcoming, 2011)
  • “Travelling Through: Cinema's Voluntary Vectors” (keynote): Film History Association of Australia & New Zealand, UNSW, Sydney - (forthcoming, 2010)
  • “The Significance of Visual Communication for Literacy Learning and National Cultural Wellbeing”, Australian New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) Conference, Canberra, 2010
  • “Expanding Horizons: Screen Literacy and Global Citizenship” (keynote): Australian Studies in Japan Association, Fukushima, Japan, 2010
  • “Hollywood and its 'bad other' ”, Inaugural Centre for Film and Television Studies Conference, Monash University, Melbourne
  • “First Nation Cinema: Hollywood's Indigenous 'Other' ”: Film History Association of Australia and New Zealand conference, Otago University NZ, 2008
  • “?Beyond Cineliteracy”, (Keynote), Japan Film Centre, Tokyo, 2008
  • “Re-imagining My World”, (keynote) Kawasaki City Film Festival Conference, Shin Yuri, Japan, 2008
  • “Expanding Our Horizons: Teaching and Using Documentaries in the Classroom”, (keynote) NSW DET Visual Literacies Conference, 2008
  • “Cineliteracy the road to World Citizenship”, (keynote), seminar organised by the Australian Embassy in Tokyo to an invited audience of Japanese educators, literacy specialists and filmmakers, Tokyo, 2006
  • “Rethinking Hollywood's Hegemony”, Discourse and Cultural Transformation Conference, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, People' Republic of China, 2004
  • “Cineliteracy, traditional literacy and levels of engagement”, (invited speaker) ATOM National Conference, 2004
  • “What constitutes the end point of cultural expression?” (invited speaker) Arc Biennial Conference, Brisbane, 2003

Back to Staff Listing

Top of page


Research

Screen Literacy:
Since 2000 Jane has been a consultant to the Equity unit of the NSW Department of Education, designing and teaching screen literacy training and classroom programs to teachers and their students from low socio-economic and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. She is expanding this research into areas of convergence, participatory culture and smart-phone movie culture within a local-global context. She is currently working with colleagues and partner organisations in regional New South Wales and Japan (NSW Department of Education - Western Region; the Japanese Academy of the Moving Image) on a project entitled Screen Literacy and Curriculum Change: Visual Culture, Literacy Learning and Educational Disadvantage.

Film/Globalisation Studies:
Jane's Ph.D. (at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney) was entitled 'Hollywood and its Others: Porous Borders and Creative Tensions in the Transnational Screenscape. She retains her research interest in this area and has recently expanded it into a geocritical space. Jane is publishing and preparing a number of conference papers and articles on these interrelated topics.

Other research interests:
These include an interdisciplinary range of topics related to the documentary form, visual culture, popular culture, censorship, Australian Cinema, First Nation Cinema, Indigenous Cultural Competence, and cinematic geocriticism.

Back to Staff Listing

Top of page


Curriculum Vitae

Top of page

Top of page