Dr Shane O'Sullivan

My teaching is focused on screenwriting, documentary and fiction production at undergraduate and postgraduate level. I am the university liaison for our partnerships with NAHEMI, albert, London Higher, the Kingston International Film Festival and the ARRI Certified Film School Accreditation Program, which offers our students an advanced camera skills qualification.

I served as an external examiner for four years at London Metropolitan University, assessing undergraduate degrees in Film and Broadcast Production, and Music Technology. I have also worked as an external consultant for the validation of Filmmaking programmes by the University of Winchester, the University of Liverpool and Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU); and moderated Cultural Technology modules for Liverpool and XJTLU.

I am a PhD supervisor and a member of the Centre for Practice Research in the Arts at Kingston. I am interested in supervising doctoral candidates with practice-based projects focused on documentary filmmaking and distribution, creative reuse of the archive or reframing political history.

Courses taught

• Film Making MA

My research includes three archive-driven feature documentaries on political history, RFK Must Die (2008), Children of the Revolution (2010) and Killing Oswald (2013); two books on political history; and published articles on film history, intelligence studies, documentary distribution and the use of moving image archive in education.

Drawing on my professional knowledge of creative reuse and licensing archival material, I devised a pilot at Kingston in 2017 to give student filmmakers access to 12 documentaries from the BFI National Archive for creative reuse on course-related projects under an educational licence. The success of the pilot led to the creation of the Archives for Education scheme and the AHRC-funded Make Film History project, which offer free access to 270 films from the BFI, BBC Archive, Northern Ireland Screen and the Irish Film Institute for creative reuse by emerging filmmakers: www.archivesforeducation.com

84 higher education institutions have signed up to the scheme, which has now expanded beyond higher education to emerging filmmakers in schools and training programmes across the UK and Ireland. I am the UK Principal Investigator on the Make Film History project, alongside Irish PI, Dr Ciara Chambers (University College Cork). An impact case study on the scheme scored 3* or above in Kingston's REF submission in 2021.

Specialisms

• Documentary filmmaking and distribution
• Creative reuse of archive material
• Political history
• Intelligence studies

Scholarly affiliations

• Learning on Screen Trustee
• National Association for Higher Education in the Moving Image (NAHEMI)
• Working Lead, Screen Heritage Group, Documentary Film Council
• Kingston University Peer Review College

Public and Civic roles

• Festival Committee, Kingston International Film Festival