Tom Rice

Professor Tom Rice is a film, media and cultural historian, with particular expertise in colonial cinemas and non-theatrical film. His first book, White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan (Indiana University Press, 2015) examines the role of cinema in the formation, development and demise of the Ku Klux Klan between 1915 and 1944. He has spoken on aspects of this work for TV and radio, for print media (including the New York Times) and written articles based on this research for publications including The Guardian and The Conversation. 

Rice’s second book, Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire (University of California Press, 2019) was supported by a Leverhulme Fellowship (2016/17). It explores the establishment and growth of the Colonial Film Units (particularly in Africa and the Caribbean) from the 1920s to the 1960s, charting the British Government’s widespread production and mobile exhibition of educational film across the British Empire. Rice previously served as the senior postdoctoral researcher on a major 3-year AHRC-funded project, writing historical essays on more than 200 films and production companies (www.colonialfilm.org.uk). In close collaboration with archives, he has also helped to organise film seasons, conferences and educational programmes.

Rice’s latest book project, Conservative Convergence: The Daily Mail and the Making of Modern Media, will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2026. The book, which is funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, tracks the ways in which conservative British newspapers, exemplified by the Daily Mail, pioneered, produced and exploited new media forms across the 20th century, from early film to radio, from newsreels to commercial television.

Rice is also currently Co-I (with Professor Vinzenz Hediger, Goethe Universität-Frankfurt) of a major European project on educational filmstrips, a critically-neglected media form that was extensively used across the globe in the mid-20th century. “Relocating Filmstrips, Remapping Europe” (2025-2027), which is funded by the AHRC-DFG, builds on an earlier 2-year RSE network grant (2022-2024). His interest in film history and archival research is also evident through Cinema St Andrews, an archival research project established for teaching in 2011.

Rice has served a wide range of administrative roles at St Andrews, including Director of Teaching and Director of Postgraduate Studies and has successfully supervised ten PhD students to completion.