Dr Des O’Rawe is a reader in Film Studies at Queen's University Belfast, where he is a research fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice.

His research focuses chiefly on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of film and screen histories, and his publications include: Documentary Film and Radical Psychiatry (Palgrave, 2024); Regarding the Real: Cinema, Documentary, and the Visual Arts (Manchester UP, 2016), and Post-Conflict Performance, Film, and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory (with Mark Phelan; Palgrave, 2016).

Recently he has co-edited a special issue of Cultural Trends (33.4, 2024), and published an essay on documentary film and translation in Writing Forward: Thinking Creatively about Translation and Performance, eds. Susan Bassnett and Piotr Blumczynski (Routledge, 2025).