Colin Burnett’s work focuses on the social history of film and media aesthetics, with an emphasis on how culture shapes the visual, sound, and storytelling choices of practitioners working in France, Québec, the UK, India, Taiwan, the Middle East, and other national and transnational contexts.
Burnett's first book, The Invention of Robert Bresson: The Auteur and His Market (2017), re-reads the elusive Bresson style as the product of a subtle form of exchange between the auteur and a confluence of recent aesthetic, literary, theoretical, and cinephilic trends. He is currently at work on a second book, titled Serial Bonds: The Multimedia Life of 007, which investigates the creative “play” the James Bond franchise has fostered among authorized and unauthorized writers and artists around the globe and how this play has resulted in one of the most complex experiments in serial storytelling in the history of the media franchise.
Serial Bonds will be the first in film, media, and literary studies to situate James Bond at a crucial hinge point in the history of modern serial culture. It demonstrates that the Bond franchise ushered in the contemporary era of media franchising by innovating a story production regime that could, for the first time, ensure a consistent output of serialized series in multiple, high-profile media. Novelist Ian Fleming and his partners in the film, comics, and gaming industries in effect modernized the franchise, laying the foundations for the current transmedia craze, even as they developed a multimedia storytelling form—until now, entirely unstudied in franchise scholarship—that differs markedly from the transmedia paradigm. In dialogue with scholarship that has recently begun to revise the historical narrative around modern franchising, Serial Bonds contends that since its inception the Bond franchise has not only relied on unified, transmedia story production—earlier than the internet age—but experimented with an entirely distinct multimedia approach derived in part from trends in early to mid-20th century franchising. Refining the creative practices of earlier franchises, in which licensed producers sought multiplicity across product lines, the Bond licensing network took disunity in a fresh direction, creating a new multimedia form called threaded media storytelling, which offers consumers numerous, mutually exclusive serialized series, each in its own medium. In other words, the horizontal rather than top-down production regime within the Bond franchise encouraged storytellers to compete with one another, creating a sub-market of rival, long-form continuities documenting the numerous “lives” of 007.
Here is a video lecture on Professor Burnett's James Bond research: Go To Video Lecture
Professor Burnett has advised numerous graduate and undergraduate research projects, on such topics as world-building in modern literature and media franchising, streaming (SVoD) services in contemporary France, the Indian New Wave as a transnational phenomenon, virtual reality as a personal identity problem, the representation of HIV/AIDS in US film, transgressive feminist cinema in the Soviet Union, and non-realist filmmaking during China's Urban Generation. You can sample some of the publications that have resulted from this research here: https://fms.wustl.edu/undergraduate-research. He has also served on several MFA thesis committees at Washington University's Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts.