R. L. Armstrong is an Associate Tutor affiliated with the British Film Institute. He did his PhD research at Cambridge University on the representation of mourning in modern and contemporary cinema. Current projects include a monograph for Wallflower on Jacques Touneur's I Walked with a Zombie and a book on the aesthetics of mourning cinema for Cambridge Scholars' Publishing. In 2005 he brought the work of the "lost" British film writer Irene Dobson to international attention. Previous works include Billy Wilder (McFarland, 2000), Understanding Realism (British Film Institute, 2005), and he is co-author with Tom Charity, Jessica Winter and Lloyd Hughes, of the Rough Guide to Film (Penguin, 2007). In Cambridge he has a reputation for pranksterism and social frenzy that follows him about like a rumour of swine "flu."