Christine Gledhill is professor emeritus in film studies and Visiting Professor at the University of Sunderland. She is one of the most prominent experts on the theory of film genres in general and on the theory of melodrama in particular. Her wide-ranging research interests also include feminist film theory and British cinema, especially of the 1920s.

Currently, Christine Gledhill is working on the research project “The Melodramatic Field Revisited”, in the course of which she is updating her own essay “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation” – still one of the most important film theoretical texts on melodrama. The project is not only describing the emergence of the genre of melodrama in the arts of the 19^th century, but also discusses the current research on this genre. 

Her publications include several seminal essays (“The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation” (1987), “Signs of Melodrama” (1991), “Rethinking Genre” (2000), “Rethinking Gender/Genre Relations in the Postmodern Era” (2004), etc.) as well as – among others – Home Is Where the Heart Is: Essays on Melodrama and the Woman's Film (ed., BFI, 1987), Reinventing Film Studies (ed. with Linda Williams, Edward Arnold, 2000) and Gender into Genre: Cross-currents in Post-War Cinema (ed., University of Illinois Press, 2012).