This thesis argues that the work of contemporary writer Tan Lin proposes, through the figure of “ambient textuality,” an intervention into existing theories of “ambience” …
Motivated by a desire to assess both the positive and negative cultural legacies of classical Hollywood cinema, this thesis focuses on a genre descendant of …
My dissertation examines contemporary humanitarian media empowerment initiatives, arguing that their interventionist rhetorical strategies further exoticize their marginalized beneficiaries by mobilizing their alterity as a …
City of Woes is short narrative film written and directed by Alexandre Jerard (AJ) Davis. The story follows a lost traveler attempting to escape from …
This dissertation examines the period 1988-1996 from the perspective of two concurrent yet contrasting occurrences: the arrival of a supposedly final historical stage pronounced by …
“Look, a Negro!” The famous deictic cited by Frantz Fanon indicates both the spectacular and banal appearance of racial blackness in our field of vision. …
Coding, reading, writing, and critique: a description of programming as a formal practice of “diagramming,” i.e. the creation of figures and topologies that traverse multiple …
This thesis explores what I call the SoundCloud digital underground, a flourishing online music scene which fuses hyperpop and SoundCloud rap. I argue that artists …
This dissertation confronts the changing contours of what we call "cinema" through an examination of uses of the moving image and references to film history …
The dissertation makes the case that recent digital and performance art practices have compelled a reappraisal of Western feminism, which has become increasingly vulnerable to …
This dissertation examines how producer-distributor trade organizations contributed to the emergence of the American studio system during the 1910s and 1920s. Established to oppose censorship …
This dissertation examines the politics of intimacy in the New American Cinema (NAC), an independent film culture that emerged in the U.S. at the end …
Without diminishing the importance of political responsibility, the indispensability of collective action, or one’s need and desire to care about our collective future, the aim …
Memes have become something of a vernacular language for young people online, as the proper understanding and usage of a meme displays subcultural knowledge and …
This dissertation argues that the everyday is a phenomenon invented along with capitalist modernity and modern technologies of representation, and that cinema is one of …
This project confronts the term "convergence," which crystallizes a matrix of current cultural phenomena, from corporate consolidation to technical integration to user participation, that are …
This dissertation interprets video games in terms of the theory and history of modernity, complicating the scholarly analysis of video games by examining continuities and …
