Main Content
Lies Van de Vijver
Affiliation & Contact
Ghent University: Centre For Cinema And Media Studies (CIMS)
HomerNetwork
E-Mail : Liesbeth.vandevijver[at]ugent.be
Twitter : @LiesVandeVijver @CinemaAudiences
ORCID : 0000 0003 0955 0255
Academic Bibliography: Dr. Lies Van de Vijver
Research Areas
New Cinema History, Historical Audience Studies, Film Programming, Oral History
Biography
Lies Van de Vijver is a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies, Ghent University, Belgium and Visiting Research Academic at Oxford Brookes University, United Kingdom. Her research focusses on historical screen culture, film programming and cinema experience in Ghent, and has been published in Cultural Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal for Media History, The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, and in edited collections. She has organized a public exhibition on the history of cinema in Ghent, and is working on a consecutive book. She has been awarded a British Academy Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2015-2017), and coordinated the FWO funded Digital Cinema Studies Network (2014-2018) and the HoMER Network (2014-2016). She is the co-investigator and project manager of European Cinema Audiences, a AHRC funded comparative research into cinema audiences in seven European cities in the 1950s. She is currently working on an edited volume with Daniel Biltereyst on the digitalization of movie magazines.
Current Research
European Cinema Audiences is a comparative research project that explores European cinema cultures in the 1950s. In this project a comparative research model will re-evaluate the popular reception of film by using an oral history study while reconstructing the film programming and exhibition structure in seven mid-sized European cities: Ghent (Belgium), Bari (Italy), Leicester (Great Britain), Rotterdam (The Netherlands), Brno (Czech Republic), Magdeburg (Germany), and Gothenburg (Sweden). The project has four core objectives: (1) to create a digital archive of cinema-going material collected from public archives; (2) to investigate cinema-going preference and gain a deeper understanding of the cultural specificities of diverse communities by collecting and analyzing film programming data; (3) to engage different generations of audiences to foster participation with the digital archive; and (4) to contribute to the transnational and comparative history of European film programming, exhibition and reception.
Network-related Publications (selection)
◦ Ercole, P., D.T. Gennari, S. Dibeltulo & L. Van de Vijver (2016) Cinema Heritage in Europe. Special Issue Aphaville, Journal of Film and Screen Media.
◦ Van de Vijver, L. (2019) ‘Why young people still go to the movies: historical and contemporary cinemagoing audiences in Belgium', in R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst & Ph. Meers (eds.) Routledge Companion to New Cinema History (pp.378-386). London & New York: Routledge.
◦ Van de Vijver, L. (2017) ‘The cinema is dead, long live the cinema!: Understanding the social experience of cinema-going today’, Participations. Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 14(1): 129-144.
◦ Van de Vijver, L. (2016) ‘Going to the Exclusive Show: Exhibition Strategies and Movie-going Memories of Disney’s Animated Feature Films in Ghent, 1937–1982’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 19(4): 403-418.
◦ Van de Vijver, L. & D. Biltereyst (2013) ‘Cinemagoing as a conditional part of everyday life. Memories of cinemagoing in Ghent from the 1930s to the 1970s’, Cultural Studies 27(4): 561-584.
◦Van de Vijver, L. (2017) ‘The cinema is dead, long live the cinema!: Understanding the social experience of cinema-going today’, Participations. Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 14(1): 129-144.
