Glen Donnar

Dr Glen Donnar is a researcher on screen representations of men and masculinities, stardom and celebrity, and lectures in Popular Culture and Asian Media & Culture.

Dr Donnar is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media and Communication. His research on popular cultural and screen representations of men and masculinities, stardom and celebrity sits at the intersection of cultural and cinema studies.

Dr Donnar’s first book, Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 (UP Mississippi 2020) is the first multi-genre study of representations of masculinity following the emergence of violent terror in post-9/11 American cinema. The book demonstrates that the reassertion of masculinity and American national identity in post-9/11 cinema repeatedly unravels across subgenres including disaster melodrama, monster movies, postapocalyptic science fiction, discovered footage and home invasion horror, action-thrillers, and frontier westerns. The book is endorsed by Professor Sean Redmond as “a must-have addition to the literature on 9/11 cinema”. The book has been widely recognised as a theoretically “innovative” (Men & Masculinities) and “meticulous examination” (New Review of Film and Television Studies) that“challeng[es] the reader to hereafter interpret this often-encountered cinematic genre in an entirely new light” (CHOICE).

Dr Donnar is completing a book on Ageing Masculinity in Hollywood Action Film (BFI) and a co-edited volume on Asian Celebrity and Digital Media (Hong Kong UP). He is a member of the editorial board for the Asian Celebrity and Fandom Studies series for Bloomsbury (Asian Studies) and an inaugural member of the Performance and Stardom Scholarly Interest Group in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). Dr Donnar also routinely comments on gender, celebrity and popular culture in the media, including for ABC online, Radio National, New Scientist, Cosmopolitan and The Conversation.

Dr Donnar’s applied research on men and masculinities for the interdisciplinary Healthier Masculinities project is informing government, university and industry initiatives to define and promote healthy masculinities. The project includes numerous student-led co-designed proposals for partners such as The Man Cave, Respect RMIT and Safer Community (RMIT). The project team’s multidisciplinary research (Routledge, 2018) also informed the Victorian Government’s 2016-17 water safety campaign targeting older males (with the Royal Life Saving Society).

Dr Donnar is a highly accomplished educator with extensive international experience developed over two decades. He has extensive teaching experience and a demonstrated commitment to enhancing the student experience at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. Dr Donnar’s innovations in assessment design that incorporate student-centred and team-based learning are highly valued by students. He was a featured subject in the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) funded project, Finding common ground: Enhancing interaction between domestic & international students (2008-2010). He currently teaches into the Contextual Studies minors in Approaches to Popular Culture and Asian Media & Culture. He has also taught into Cinema Studies and Literary Studies. Glen is a registered research supervisor who is able to supervise students at MA and PhD levels.

Dr Donnar is a member of the Australian Film Critics Association (affiliated member of FIPRESCI), the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the Australia and New Zealand American Studies Association, and the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association.

Dr Donnar has published diversely on stardom and celebrity, and popular cultural and screen representations of men and masculinity in film and television. He has also published on the mediation of terror in news media, and the ethics of news viewership. He is the author of Troubling Masculinities: Terror, Gender, and Monstrous Others in American Film Post-9/11 (2020) and the co-editor of the Celebrity Studies special issue ‘Starring Asia: Asian Stardom and Celebrity’(2021). Dr Donnar’s research has also featured in Media International Australia, Celebrity Studies, Journal of Popular Culture, Communication, Politics and Culture, and Senses of Cinema.

Culture, Gender and Sexuality, Men and Masculinity, Film & Television, Celebrity and Stardom, Asian digital media, Genre, Hollywood, Terrorism and 9/11

• Men and Masculinity
• Film & Television
  
• Celebrity and Stardom
• Genre studies (including Action, Disaster, Horror, Science Fiction, Westerns and Post-Apocalypse)
  
• Popular culture, Gender and Society (including in Asia)
• Hollywood
  
• Terrorism in popular culture (especially cultural responses to 9/11)

• Clem Bastow, PhD, 2019-23, “I can’t describe what I’m feeling”: articulating an Autistic screenwriting practice through the Hollywood action genre
• Divya Garg, PhD, 2018-22, Fandom and Disability: Imagining a Politics of Inclusivity through Marvel Global Media Fandom
• Merinda Staubli, PhD, 2018-22, Spectral Thresholds and Monstrous Pedagogies:Characterising and Remembering Millennial Children’s Horror Television in Australia
• Russell Edwards, PhD, 2017-22, Looking into the Rising Sun: Representations of Japan and the Japanese in South Korean cinema during the Park Geun-hye era
• Hsham Aburghif, PhD, 2018-23, “Iraqi Street Life”: Using i-doc practice to challenge stereotypes of Iraq and Iraqis in Hollywood cinema
• Eloise Florence, PhD, 2016-20, Entangling pasts: remembering Allied attacks on Berlin from the air through sites on the ground