Congratulations to Robinson PhD student Toby Ashworth who has won an award from the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies (BAFTSS) for the best published essay by a doctoral student in 2023, full list here:

His article 'Tectonic Memories: Film, Geology and Archives in Diana Vidrașcu's Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream?’ was published in Studies in World Cinema, 3:1, 2023. Toby discuss an experimental short documentary film, Volcano: What Does a Lake Dream?, which was directed by Diana Vidrașcu and is loosely about two volcanic eruptions in the Azores that produced new islands that subsequently disappeared under the sea. He uses Gilles Deleuze’s writing on islands to explore the temporal, philosophical, and mediatic implications of volcanic eruption, island formation, and what might be thought of as the 'volcanic archive'. He argues that in the film’s effort to reassert human memories of tectonic processes alongside those visible in the landscape, it brings together human and geological timescales and refuses to silence human memory in relation to the breadth of geological time. The article is drawn from Toby’s PhD research about the use and re-use of images of volcanoes in documentary film, where the volcanic becomes a way to understand human relations to the changing earth and its history more broadly.

The judges' comments on the article:
"The article explores human perception, memory and the imperceptible longevity of geographical change through an insightful study of Diana Vidrașcu’s Volcano: What does a Lake Dream? Drawing from Deleuze’s discussion of islands, the article explicates the temporality and materiality of the human and non-human, of human archives and histories that resist being subsumed to the duration of tectonic processes. Exceptional work."