Brett Mills

Brett Mills teaches and researches in television, media and film at Edge Hill University, UK, and is an Honorary Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. His key foci include: the politics of popular culture, especially television; critical animal studies, particularly in terms of animal representations in popular culture; and comedy, as a powerfully disruptive social force, in forms such as sitcom and stand-up. He is the author of Television Sitcom (2005), The Sitcom (2012), and Animals on Television: The Cultural Making of the Non-Human (2017). He is the co-author (with Erica Horton) of Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry (2017) and (with David Barlow) of two editions of Reading Media Theory: Thinkers, Approaches, Contexts (2009, 2012). He is a member of the team who undertook the two Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded (AHRC) projects on multispecies storytelling: Multispecies Storytelling: More-Than-Human Narratives About Landscape (2019-22) and Multisensory Multispecies Storytelling to Engage Disadvantaged Groups in Changing Landscapes (2020-22). He was the Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project Make Me Laugh: Creativity in the British Television Comedy Industry (2012-15). He has undertaken Research Fellowships at Animal Charity Evaluators (2021) and the Future Matters Project (2022), is a Senior Fellow of the UK’s Higher Education Academy, is an affiliated researcher for the Centre for Comedy Studies Research, Brunel University, UK, and is a member of the Centre for Human-Animal Studies at Edge Hill University. From 2016-19 he was the resident television expert for BBC Radio Norfolk, and since 2014 has been a reviewer of stand-up comedy for Fest magazine.

Email: Millsb@edgehill.ac.uk