English, Media and Creative Arts

Dr. Crosson's research interests include the relationship between film, visual media and sport; and Irish film and literature. He has authored, edited, or co-edited ten books and over fifty mostly single-authored peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters to date. Among his current research areas is an examination of the growth and significance of Irish-language cinema with several forthcoming publications on the topic. He is the Leader of the Sport & Exercise Research Group within the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies and Co-Director of the BA Performance and Screen Studies Subject. His research projects include an examination of the representation of sport in film, the subject of a conference and several symposia held in University of Galway over the past ten years, and his award-winning monographs Sport and Film (Routledge, 2013) and Gaelic Games on Film: From silent films to Hollywood hurling, horror and the emergence of Irish cinema (Cork University Press, 2019), recipient of the Dean's Award for Research (2020). He has also uncovered important depictions of sport in film, in particular of Gaelic games, and his research has been featured in national and international media, including The Irish Times, The Irish Examiner, The Sunday Independent, El País, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Business Post, the international TV channels ITV, and ARTE and several items on TG4, RTÉ News and Off the Ball. To date he has contributed to twelve documentary projects, including a 6-part documentary series on newsreels in Ireland broadcast by TG4 in 2018, and he is currently writing and co-producing a new major TG4 series examining depictions of Gaelic games on film based on his 2019 monograph. He was also the Archive Footage consultant for the RTE documentary series The Game: The Story of Hurling (2019), acclaimed as among the greatest documentary productions ever made on the sport, which features material he has uncovered during his research. His research in this area has also resulted in contributions to several major collections, including the award-winning volume The Gaelic Athletic Association 1884-2009 and Screening Irish-America: Representing Irish-America in Film and Television. In addition, he has co-edited special numbers of the prestigious peer-reviewed journals Media History on "Sport and the Media in Ireland" (Vol. 17, Issue 2, 2011) and Sport in Society: "sport, the media and Ireland: intersections of gender, class and geography" (Vol. 27, Issue 6, 2024). He also did the research towards, and provided the liner notes for GAA Gold - All Ireland Hurling Championship Finals 1948-1959 (Irish Film Institute, 2010) and GAA Football Gold: All-Ireland Final Highlights: 1947-1959 (Irish Film Institute, 2011), best-selling DVDs which made available rarely seen footage of hurling and football all-Ireland finals in these years. He is Project Leader of the Sport in European Cinema initiative, a research and education platform and database capturing the extraordinary story of how sport has featured across the history of European cinema. 

Punk Aesthetics In Cinema: The Intersections Of Punk Movements, Queer Histories And Subcultural Filmmaking (primary-supervisor, 2021)

Investigating the impact of cultural products from dominant Western countries on indigenous or minority cultures (Practice-based, primary-supervisor, 2016)

     

I-Ulysses: A virtual learning environment for James Joyce's Ulysses (Practice-based, primary supervisor 2015)

   

Living the Stories We Create: An Educational Response to Narrative in the Digital Age (2016)

    

Disability, deficiency and excess : a critical re-examination of the construction, production and representations of physical disability in contemporary European film (2015)

  

Comic-Book Movie: The Industrial and Formal Importance of the Comic Book Adaptation in Contemporary Hollywood Filmmaking. (2011)   

As President of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS) (2013-2019), Dr. Crosson also facilitated and contributed to a wide range of further research and networking projects, including the translation projects Yeats Reborn [http://www.yeatsreborn.eu/], the John Banville Translation Project [http://www.johnbanville.eu/] and the Aistriú: Crossing Territories, Languages & Artforms project [https://www.aistriu.eu/]. He was the lead author of a report on Irish Studies in Europe - Irish Studies in continental Europe today and its potential (2018) - and is also a member of the stakeholder network of the Horizon2020 supported project SHAPE-ID.

He is currently a research partner on the following funded research projects:

* The Film Corner for all. Digital innovative environments for film and media literacy (Funded by EU Creative Europe programme)
* F-Airplay: Women, Sport & Media (Funded by Sport Ireland and the Olympic Federation of Ireland)
* INTRUTHS 2: Articulations of Individual and Communal Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Irish Writing (Funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science)
* Football and Visual Culture under Francoism: Discourses of Class, Gender and National Construction in Cinema, Newsreels and the Press 1939-1975 (FUCAV) (Funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science)

Dr. Crosson is a member of the Management Committee of the EU COST Action "Language Plurality in Europe's Changing Media Sphere (PLURILINGMEDIA)" (CA23105) concerned with advancing collaboration and bringing coherence to the field of European media from the perspective of language plurality, encouraging involvement of scholars in related disciplines and facilitating knowledge transfer between academics and practitioners

.

He has also been an expert evaluator for major European funding agencies and institutions including the EC Commission, the National Science Centre (Poland), and the National University of Ireland.

Dr. Crosson's teaching interests include World Cinema, Documentary, Film History, Irish Cinema, Sport Cinema, and Research Methods. He also teaches classes on adaptation, gender and cinema, and experimental film.