Clara Bradbury-Rance is a film scholar, critic and teacher based in London. She works primarily on contemporary lesbian, queer and trans cinema and screen cultures. She is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Sexuality Studies at King's College London and has a PhD in Screen Studies from the University of Manchester.
Clara’s book Lesbian Cinema after Queer Theory was published by Edinburgh University Press and translated into Spanish by Osífragos (both 2019). The book’s key arguments are introduced and discussed in an interview with Clara for Lambda Literary.
Clara has published widely on LGBTQ+ film and media, including essays on queer masculinity; Netflix and queer taste; citational practice; cinephilia; the sex scene; and the work of filmmakers such as Dee Rees, Lisa Cholodenko, Maryam Keshavarz, Lisa Aschan and Desiree Akhavan.
Clara is currently working on two new book projects: a semi-autobiographical account of spectatorship, masculinity and lesbian and trans film and tv, and a BFI Classic on Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Clara’s academic writing has appeared in the journals Camera Obscura, French Screen Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Pedagogy, Feminist Theory, MAI, New Review of Film and Television Studies and Film Quarterly. She is also a regular contributor to Sight and Sound magazine.
Clara has collaborated with the following UK organisations: British Film Institute, Rio Cinema, London Feminist Film Festival, BFI Flare, ParaPride, POUTfest, Screen 25, Arrow Films, StudioCanal, Barbican, Club des Femmes, Curzon Soho, LGBT Foundation, Queer Contact Festival and HOME. International collaborations include the China Women's Film Festival, MIC Género (Mexico), and the Cineteca Nacional (Mexico). She has been on the board of the research centre Queer@King's since 2017.
Clara has been invited to speak at the Universities of Warwick, St Andrews, Essex, LSE, Stirling, UCL, Queen Mary and Westminster (UK); USC, Michigan and Mount Holyoke (USA); Leuphana (Germany); Gothenburg (Sweden); Monash (Australia); Le Mans and Sciences Po (France); and the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the Facultad de Cine (Mexico). In February-March 2023, Clara was a visiting fellow at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre at the University of Sydney. In April 2024, Clara was a public scholar-in-residence at the Consortium for Gender, Sexuality, Race and Public Culture at the University of Southern California.
Clara has given up on social media but feel free to email her on clara.bradbury-rance [at] kcl.ac.uk