Dr Joyleen Christensen

Dr Joyleen Christensen is a Senior Lecturer in Screen, Media, Cultural Studies, and Literature in the Pathways and Academic Learning Support Centre at the University of Newcastle's Central Coast campus.

Joyleen is the recipient of a number of teaching and learning support excellence awards, including an OLT Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, two Vice-Chancellor's Awards for Teaching Excellence and Learning Support, a Vice-Chancellor's Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, and the inaugural English Language & Foundation Studies Award for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

Joyleen's research focuses on issues related to her chosen disciplines of film, media, cultural studies, and literature, as well as her interest in pedagogy and support strategies centred on enabling education. Her doctoral thesis - 'Where in the world is Andy Lau? Putting the 'popular' back into studies of Hong Kong popular entertainment' - examined the production and consumption of contemporary celebrity against significant social and historical movements in regional and transnational cultural relations over the last thirty years. In 2015, she was the recipient of the ELFSC Research Excellence Award and took up a position as a Visiting Scholar with the Centre for Cinema Studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Joyleen's recent supervision activities are in the area of celebrity/fan cultures and adaptations, including supervision of Honours theses that explored the relationship between feminism and the 2017 Wonder Woman film plus an investigation into how stories are adapted to reflect different cultural values using The Ballad of Mulan as a case study.  She is currently the primary supervisor for a doctoral theses examining the fandom of the television show, Supernatural, and another looking at Psychoanalytic Cosmology: Trauma, Outer Space, and the Myth of the Hero.

Recent research interests include: Asian films and BL dramas; K-pop; and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In addition to articles for The Conversation on the films Everything Everywhere All At Once, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and The Great Wall, she has published book chapters on the Hollywood remake of Hong Kong blockbuster, Infernal Affairs, an auteur study of the Korean ‘Kimchee Western’, The Good, The Bad, The Weird, and a chapter on the long-running television show, Supernatural, in Fame and Fandom: Functioning On and Offline. Current works include chapters on the cinematic deconstruction of Harvey Keitel’s masculine star persona in Gender Perspectives in Media and Performance, Asian superstar Andy Lau's performance of a revised patriotism during the Hong Kong Handover era inEast Asia Pop Culture and Fandom Studies, and an investigation of manufactured intimacy through the on and off-screen performance of coupledom by Asian BL celebrities in Celebrity Bromance and Comradery Capital in Asia (all currently in publication).

In particular, the article ‘Butt plug duels and fanny pack stunts:  How Everything Everywhere All at Once fits into the cannon of comedy-martial arts films’ (published on The Conversation in April 2022) has attracted significant attention. With more than 41,000 reads – and an additional 16,000 plus reads of the Spanish translation – the article currently has an Altmetric Explorer attention score of 114, positioning it within the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetric. Source: https://www.altmetric.com/details/127494869