Sarah Thomas – författare

First published in 1994, The Complete Guide to Finding the Birds of Australia was the first ever book of its type in Australia – a complete guide to locating every resident bird species in Australia, plus supplementary information on where to find rarities, migratory species and logistical information.

This fully revised second edition expands on the best-selling appeal of the first, describing the best-known sites for all of Australia’s endemic birds, plus vagrants and regular migrants such as seabirds and shorebirds. It covers all states and territories, and is the first guide to include all of Australia’s island and external territories. A comprehensive Bird Finder Guide details site information on all Australian bird species, and the authors provide valuable travel advice, including transport, climate and accommodation.

Profusely illustrated with colour photographs of interesting, unique or unusual Australian birds, this book is a must-have for all birdwatchers living in Australia or visiting from overseas.

Peter Lorre described himself as merely a ‘face maker’. His own negative attitude also characterizes traditional perspectives which position Lorre as a tragic figure within film history: the promising European artist reduced to a Hollywood gimmick, unable to escape the murderous image of his role in Fritz Lang’s M. This book shows that the life of Peter Lorre cannot be reduced to a series of simplistic oppositions. It reveals that, despite the limitations of his macabre star image, Lorre’s screen performances were highly ambitious, and the terms of his employment were rarely restrictive. Lorre’s career was a complex negotiation between transnational identity, Hollywood filmmaking practices, the ownership of star images and the mechanics of screen performance.

Smart Stardom explores how contemporary celebrities are digitally replicated and re-circulated through advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer-generated imagery, real-time rendering, and virtual and augmented media.

Discussing how these digital developments produce highly compelling virtual versions of real stars – what the book terms the “smart star” – whose digital identities remain anchored to recognisable, real-world figures, the authors explore how these virtual celebrities generate economic and cultural value through familiarity, affective connection, and nostalgia, while also embodying urgent questions about consent, ownership, and the control of famous faces and voices. Drawing on a wide range of global case studies from film, music, advertising, activism, and politics, Smart Stardom examines how key figures are mobilised to help audiences engage with emerging digital environments, and how celebrity operates as a key point of entry into complex and often opaque technologies, used to authenticate new experiences while negotiating public anxieties around AI, data, and digital identity. Structured around the themes of image, likeness, nostalgia, and trust, Smart Stardom asks why celebrity remains vital to the adoption of new digital technologies, exploring both the agency of public figures in extending their identities into virtual spaces and the ways the global entertainment industry has expanded and exploited the appeal of licensed digital stardom.

This book will appeal to researchers, students and scholars working in film and media industries, human-computer interaction (HCI), business, cultural theory, fandom studies, technology studies, sociology, and media stardom.

Smart Stardom explores how contemporary celebrities are digitally replicated and re-circulated through advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer-generated imagery, real-time rendering, and virtual and augmented media.

Discussing how these digital developments produce highly compelling virtual versions of real stars – what the book terms the “smart star” – whose digital identities remain anchored to recognisable, real-world figures, the authors explore how these virtual celebrities generate economic and cultural value through familiarity, affective connection, and nostalgia, while also embodying urgent questions about consent, ownership, and the control of famous faces and voices. Drawing on a wide range of global case studies from film, music, advertising, activism, and politics, Smart Stardom examines how key figures are mobilised to help audiences engage with emerging digital environments, and how celebrity operates as a key point of entry into complex and often opaque technologies, used to authenticate new experiences while negotiating public anxieties around AI, data, and digital identity. Structured around the themes of image, likeness, nostalgia, and trust, Smart Stardom asks why celebrity remains vital to the adoption of new digital technologies, exploring both the agency of public figures in extending their identities into virtual spaces and the ways the global entertainment industry has expanded and exploited the appeal of licensed digital stardom.

This book will appeal to researchers, students and scholars working in film and media industries, human-computer interaction (HCI), business, cultural theory, fandom studies, technology studies, sociology, and media stardom.

Although children have proliferated in Spain’s cinema since its inception, nowhere are they privileged and complicated in quite the same way as in the films of the 1970s and early 1980s, a period of radical political and cultural change for the nation as it emerged from almost four decades of repressive dictatorship under the rule of General Francisco Franco. In Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition, Sarah Thomas analyses the cinematic child within this complex historical conjuncture of a nation looking back on decades of authoritarian rule and forward to an uncertain future.

Examining films from several genres by four key directors of the Transition – Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice, and Jaime de Armiñán – Thomas explores how the child is represented as both subject and object, and self and other, and consistently cast in a position between categories or binary poles. She demonstrates how the cinematic child that materializes in this period is a fundamentally shifting, oscillating, ambivalent figure that points toward the impossibility of fully comprehending the historical past and the figure of the other, while inviting an ethical engagement with each.

Although children have proliferated in Spain’s cinema since its inception, nowhere are they privileged and complicated in quite the same way as in the films of the 1970s and early 1980s, a period of radical political and cultural change for the nation as it emerged from almost four decades of repressive dictatorship under the rule of General Francisco Franco. In Inhabiting the In-Between: Childhood and Cinema in Spain’s Long Transition, Sarah Thomas analyses the cinematic child within this complex historical conjuncture of a nation looking back on decades of authoritarian rule and forward to an uncertain future.

Examining films from several genres by four key directors of the Transition – Carlos Saura, Antonio Mercero, Víctor Erice, and Jaime de Armiñán – Thomas explores how the child is represented as both subject and object, and self and other, and consistently cast in a position between categories or binary poles. She demonstrates how the cinematic child that materializes in this period is a fundamentally shifting, oscillating, ambivalent figure that points toward the impossibility of fully comprehending the historical past and the figure of the other, while inviting an ethical engagement with each.