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Biography
James McNamara is Head of Production and Associate Professor of Teaching in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With Jim Kearney, he co-convenes the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Research Focus Group on Adaptation Studies.
McNamara’s scholarship addresses the longue durée intellectual history of imitatio, originality, and adaptation, as well as formalist analysis of screen adaptations of literature, particularly Shakespeare and other Renaissance drama. His book in progress, Metamorphoses: An Intellectual History of Adaptation, traces how classical theories of imitatio were reinterpreted in the Renaissance, reshaped by Romantic theories of originality, and continue to structure screen adaptations today.
McNamara pairs historical formalism with recherche-création (research-creation), an approach that investigates questions of screen narrative form, style, and adaptation through creative work, and draws on his professional practice as a screenwriter and showrunner. He created The Artful Dodger (Disney+ and Hulu) and wrote and executive produced Seasons 1 and 2. Season 1 received seven Australian Academy Award (AACTA) nominations, including for Best Television Drama Series; Season 2 was nominated for a Logie Award for Best Scripted Comedy Program. Twice named an “international rising star” by BAFTA LA, McNamara has also executive produced scripted drama for Disney+ and Amazon, written and directed for Audible, and worked in writers’ rooms for international production companies including the Academy Award-winning See-Saw Films.
McNamara is affiliated faculty in UCSB’s Department of English, Early Modern Center, and Comparative Literature Program, and he was previously a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney and Junior Dean of Pembroke College, University of Oxford, where he was a Clarendon Scholar. His cultural criticism has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, and Australian Book Review, on whose editorial advisory board he previously served.