The Association of Adaptation Studies Board

Co-Chair and Social Media Officer
Colleen Kennedy-Karpat

Colleen Kennedy-Karpat is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University in Ankara, Türkiye, where she has taught film and media studies since 2010. She served as Associate Editor of Adaptation from 2021-2024 and joined the AAS Board of Trustees in 2022.

Colleen has co-edited the volumes Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (2017) and The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda (2022) in addition to special issues of the journals Adaptation, on the subject of Adaptation and Nostalgia (2020; vol. 13 no. 3); and Open Screens, on Teaching Women’s Filmmaking (2022; vol. 5 no. 2). Her monograph Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (2013) won the Northeast Modern Language Association Book Award.

Other work has appeared in MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture, Camera Obscura, the Journal of Popular Film and Television, French Screen Studies, Short Film Studies, and a number of edited volumes, including Adaptation in Turkish Literature, Cinema, and Media (2025), Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation in the Twenty-First Century (2023), and A Companion to the Biopic (2020). She co-hosts the podcast You Made Me Watch That?! and her videographic work is on Vimeo @cbkenkar. She is also currently video essay editor for the undergraduate journal Film Matters.

Her current research focuses on the work of Agnès Varda, including intertextuality in her late documentaries and representations of motherhood throughout her seven-decade filmography.

Read Colleen Kennedy-Karpat’s academic profile.

Co-Chair and Treasurer
Christina Wilkins

Christina Wilkins is a researcher in contemporary film, television, and literature with a specialism in adaptations and mental health. She has published various chapters related to these fields, regularly participates in the AAS conferences, has established the BAFTSS Adaptation group, and has released books in this area including Embodying Adaptation: Character and the Body (2022) and Authenticity and Adaptation (2025). She currently teaches at the University of Birmingham, UK. Christina’s other research interests include identity, memory, and queer studies.

Read Christina Wilkins’ academic profile.

Treasurer
Seda Öz

Seda Öz is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English at the University of Delaware, where she teaches writing, world literature, and cinema. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of adaptation studies, film history, and transnational media industries, with a particular focus on remakes, cultural translation, and the politics of circulation across Turkish and European contexts. Her work also engages a wider set of national cinemas and literatures, including German, French, Italian, British, American, and Mexican traditions, bringing comparative and cross-cultural perspectives to debates on adaptation, authorship, and screen heritage.

Öz is the editor of Adaptation in Turkish Literature, Cinema, and Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), published as part of Palgrave’s Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture series. Her research has appeared in leading venues including Adaptation, Critical Survey, Literature/Film Quarterly, and the SCMS journal, and she has contributed chapters to edited collections such as The Routledge Companion to European Cinema.

In addition to her research and teaching, Öz is active in professional service and scholarly community-building. She serves as Treasurer of the Association of Adaptation Studies, is Secretary of the Literature/Film Association, and is Media Reviews Editor for Adaptation. She is also the founding editor of Adaptation Today and serves on the organizing committee for the AAS–LFA Virtual Joint Conferences.

Read Seda Öz’s academic profile.

Secretary:
Kristen Figgins

Kristen Figgins is an Assistant Professor of English in the department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy at Mississippi University for Women. Her research focuses on how evolutionary science is adapted into transhistorical textual and visual media. You can read her work in journals like Adaptation and Literature/Film Quarterly. She is a founding editor of Adaptation Today and an associate editor at Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.

Read Kristen Figgins’ academic profile.

Membership Secretary
Madeleine Hunter

Madeleine Hunter is a Vice-Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at RMIT University, Australia, where her research focuses on children’s media franchises and entertainment. She has been an active member of the Association of Adaptation Studies since 2018 and has served as the Association’s Membership Secretary and Webmaster from 2022 to the present. She is also a member of the Adaptation editorial board 2023, guest-editing the journal’s Special Issue on Adaptation and Childhood and currently serves as of one of the journal’s associate editors. As a trustee, she would look forward to continuing to develop the association’s infrastructure and continuing to internationalise its membership and offerings.

Read Madeleine Hunter’s academic profile.

Webmaster
Liam Burke

Associate Professor Liam Burke is the Cinema and Screen Studies discipline leader at Swinburne University of Technology (Australia), where he is also a member of the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. Liam has published widely on adaptation and transmedia franchising, including the best-selling book The Comic Book Film Adaptation. Liam has been an Associate Editor of the Oxford University Press journal Adaptation since 2019, overseeing dozens of articles and helping to widen the journal’s focus beyond the page-to-screen process. Liam has developed practice-based approaches to teaching adaptation for which he has won a number of teaching awards. Prior to entering academia Liam worked for several arts organisations including the Irish Film & Television Academy (IFTA). Liam’s current research project, Everyday Adaptation, focuses on industrial, unofficial, and vernacular adaptations that are often overlooked in traditional Adaptation Studies scholarship such as cosplay, toys, and pop culture food.

Read Liam Burke’s academic profile.

Postgraduate Student Member
Moni Razavi

Moni Razavi is a PhD candidate and a part-time professor based in the School of Translation and Interpretation at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her doctoral research critically examines the power asymmetries between Translation Studies and Adaptation Studies through decolonial and epistemological frameworks, with the aim of developing a meta-theoretical intervention in Adaptation Studies. She holds two master’s degrees focused on adaptation in Iranian cinema and has presented her research on adaptation at multiple international venues. Alongside her doctoral research, Moni has worked as a research assistant and coordinator at the Humanities Data Lab, where she has contributed to digital humanities projects and explored the integration of digital methods into translation and adaptation research. Additionally, she serves as a co-chair for DHSI Aligned Conferences, furthering her experience in academic service and leadership.

Read Moni Razavi’s academic profile.

Board Member
Anna Gutowska

Anna Gutowska works as Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities at the SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland. In the years 2017-2019 she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at the Linnaeus University Centre of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies in Växjö, Sweden.

Anna has published on screen adaptations of Jane Austen's novels, neo-Victorian film and television, and biographical screen products portraying nineteenth-century subjects. Her publications include two co-authored chapters on transmediation and transmedial storyworlds in Intermedial Studies: An Introduction to Meaning Across Media (Routledge, 2021) as well as a chapter about authenticity and anachronism in HBO's series The Great, published in an edited volume Truth Claims Across Media (Palgrave, 2023).

Anna also works in the film industry as Head of Development at the WFDiF Feature and Documentary Film Studios in Warsaw. She is also a screenwriter, whose credits include costume drama series Matylda, which had a premiere at the Polish National Television (TVP) in 2024.

Read Anna Gutowska’s academic profile.

Trustee
Justin Smith (ex-officio)

Justin Smith is Professor of Cinema and Television History and Director of the Research and Innovation Institute in Arts, Design and Performance. Since 2010 he has been Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded projects: Channel 4 and British Film Culture (2010-14), Fifty Years of British Music Video (2015-2018), Transforming Middlemarch (2022-3) and Adapting Jane Austen for Educational and Public Engagement (2024-5). He is also a partner in a pilot study to safeguard vulnerable films held in private collections: Film is Fabulous! He is the author of Withnail and Us: Cult Film and Film Cults in British Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2010), and co-author (with Sue Harper) of British Film Culture in the 1970s: The Boundaries of Pleasure (EUP, 2012). His recent monograph (with Open Book Publishers, 2024) is entitled: The Birds That Wouldn’t Sing: Remembering the D-Day Wrens. Smith is primarily an archival historian with special interests in British cinema and television, and traditional music, exploring issues of cultural identity, popular memory and family history.

Read Justin Smith's academic profile.

Trustee
Deborah Cartmell (ex-officio)

Deborah Cartmell is Emeritus Professor of English at De Montfort University, Leicester. She is the founder and first Chair of the Association of Adaptation Studies and both founding editor of Adaptation (the journal of the Association of Adaptation Studies, Oxford University Press, 2008-) and of Shakespeare (the journal of the British Shakespeare Association, 2006-26). She has published over 20 books on Shakespeare and Adaptation Studies and is currently working, with Peter J. Smith, on a Handbook of Shakespeare and Bioadaptation (Routledge) and as series editor of Adaptation Histories (Bloomsbury). She is Honorary Fellow, Chair of the Events Committee, and Trustee of the British Shakespeare Association.

Read Deborah Cartmell’s academic profile

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