This dissertation argues for the political and aesthetic significance of a group of contemporary realist films that employ a non-presentational, lacunary aesthetic. Through close analyses …
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 …
The rhetoric of textual stability tends to inform much of the scholarly writing about moving images, especially those manufactured by Hollywood studios. Analytical and historical …
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 …
“Collective Housework: Post-1970s Feminist Media Cultures and the Crisis of Social Reproduction” examines feminist film and media interventions in the politics of social reproduction and …
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 …
