Claire Watt

Project Overview

Watt is working with the Leeds Animation Workshop (LAW) Archive and ‘The Southbank Show’ (SBS) Production Archive for her project, ‘Social Activism in British 1970s and 1980s Filmmaking and Broadcasting: The Cases of Leeds Animation Workshop and The Southbank Show’. She will explore how the accessibility of LAW and SBS in the late 1970s and 1980s can be understood as a form of social activism.

The research aims to uncover the differences of approach between these two case studies and what this can tell us about British filmmaking and broadcasting in the 1970s and 1980s. The objective in this research is to gain a clearer picture of the pressures put upon British filmmakers in this time period, questioning how institutional affiliation led to a different type of filmmaking than those made independently. The research will ask:

1. How did Leeds Animation Workshop and The Southbank Show each approach making information (particularly about social issues) accessible to the public in the 1970s and 1980s?
2. How were their differing approaches shaped by their differences in production, budget, scale, processes and institutional affiliation?
3. What can this tell us about the British filmmaking landscape more broadly in the 1970s and 1980s?

The proposed outputs of this project are:

1. An academic article, with potential for extension into an edited collection of essays on the topic of British filmmaking practices in the 1970s and 1980s.
2. A documentary (using footage from the Brotherton archive and empirical interviews) in order to create a living document comparing activism in independent and institutional British filmmaking practices in the 1970s and 1980s, which will reflect upon the continuing influence of both LAW and SBS today.

Profile

Watt's research focuses on modern and contemporary British and American literature and visual culture. Both her PhD research and her research project at Leeds intersect literature, film and social activism. Watt recently completed her PhD in English at the University of Cambridge. Entitled, ‘Counter-sites in 1980s New York Poetry-Videos’, the PhD considered social protest in a series of poetry-videos made by notable New York poets.

She gained her first degree from the University of Oxford and worked in copywriting and teaching before returning to academia. Watt has most recently undertaken a research project on the contemporary afterlives of the poet John Keats at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her project at Leeds considers social activism in institutional and independent filmmaking in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s.

Publications

Journal Articles

Watt, Claire, ‘“This is a woman's trip’: Adapting Ntozake Shange's for colored girls for stage and screen,’ Comparative Drama, 59.1 (2025), pp. 179-204 <doi.org/10.1353/cdr.2025.a962007>.

Watt, Claire, “We are actually here:’ Refusing Erasure in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman and ‘We Are Here’, English Studies in Africa (Forthcoming 2026).

Reviews

Watt, Claire, ‘Review: The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators’, Moveable Type XII, 'Nostalgia' (2020), pp. 86-88, UCL Discovery. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10111325/1/Implicated%20Subject.pdf

Conferences and Presentations

‘Father Death, I’m Coming Home’: Palimpsestic Place in Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Father Death Blues’ and ‘In My Kitchen In New York, British Association of American Studies Conference 2025, Hatfield (April 2025)

“This is a woman's trip”: Adapting Ntozake Shange's for colored girls for stage and screen, Comparative Drama Conference 2024, Orlando and Online (May 2024)

‘“Junk plutonium!”: Eco-optimism in Anne Waldman's ‘Uh-Oh Plutonium!’, European Beat Studies Network Conference 2024, Białystok (April 2024)

The Beats as Precursors to Solarpunk, Solarpunk Conference 2023: From Imagination to Action, Online (June 2023)

‘Feel good. Feel better. Move forward. Let it go’: Claudia Rankine's Citizen, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Conference 2022, Baltimore (March 2022)

Questioning ‘The Message’: Hip Hop’s First Taste of Institutions, European Hip Hop Studies Network Conference 2022, Paris and Online (January 2022)

‘While she whispered a song along the keyboard’: Sampling in the New York School, Cambridge University Graduate Symposium 2021, Cambridge (November 2021).