MA, Lic.Phil, PhD (University of Turku, Finland)

Course Leader, Media Studies; Senior Lecturer, Media and Communication Studies


Room: Hel 322

Email: milla.tiainen@anglia.ac.uk

Telephone: 0845 196 2075
International: +44 1223 363 271 ext 2075


Dr Milla Tiainen's research activity

Milla is Course Leader for Media Studies. She has led and taught a range of modules including Media, Culture and Identity, Research Methods in Media and Communication (archived), Theorising the Global Information Age, and Working in ECFM. In 2012-2013, she is on leave of absence whilst working as researcher in an Academy of Finland funded interdisciplinary project 'Deleuzian Music Research.'

Milla was awarded a doctorate in Musicology at the University of Turku. Her dissertation proposed a new theory of 'music as performance'. It focuses on the temporal, bodily, emergent and aesthetic/sensuous aspects of musical events, especially singing and performing on contemporary operatic stages. These themes are explored with the help of such philosophical approaches to process, the body in movement, sensation and media culture as those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rosi Braidotti, Brian Massumi and Erin Manning. Milla is presently turning this research into a monograph entitled Becoming-Singer: Cartographies of Singing, Music-Making and Opera.

Milla's previous publications include a single-authored book Locating the Composer (original Finnish title Säveltäjän sijainnit, 2005) that examines gendered conceptions of art and art-making in media texts about contemporary composers, a co-edited collection of essays on distributed agencies in musical and theatrical performance, and a number of journal articles and book chapters about encounters of opera and cinema, theories of affect, questions of the body and sexual difference, and so-called new materialist directions in cultural and media theory.

Forthcoming publications include an essay on post-humanism and affect in contemporary feminist theory for the journal Emotions, Space and Society, a co-edited special issue on the concept of rhythm for Body & Society, and further essays on rethinking voice as medium, musical performance and Anton Corbijn's film Control (2007) about Joy Division. Supported by the Academy of Finland funding, Milla is also starting work on her next monograph tentatively entitled Rhythms of Voice: Toward an Ethico-Aesthetics of Vocal Expression.

Milla is interested in supervising research in the following areas:

• sound, voice and music in the media (from cinema to social and DIY media)
• theories of affect, the body, materiality and multisensory experience
• cultural theory
• feminist media theory
• intersections of performing arts and new or 'alternative' media

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