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 …
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 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 …
This dissertation provides a critical and materialist account of the history of the media interview. Starting with Henry Mayhew’s use of the interview to investigate …
Marvel's Iron Man franchise represents technology as a vehicle for global military might, heroic masculinity, and individual enhancement fantasies. Drawing on evolving digital film technologies, …
This thesis works to clarify what an Adornean conception of Autonomous Cinema might look like through incorporating other theorists such as Aldous Huxley and Fredric …
KISSING IN THE BACKGROUND is an original screenplay about two queer students discovering their understanding of their identity as members of the LGBTQ+ community. The …
We are often told that ours is a “late” age. Lateness—as in the “late work” or “late capitalism”—simultaneously suggests something that has survived beyond its …
"Lynching and the Archive: A History," studies lynching images alongside their patterns of circulation as well as the way that they have been presented in …
With the 'massification' of digital media technologies comes their entanglements not only with our lives but that moment which defines each life, death itself. To …
This dissertation investigates the creation of “life,” meaning the transformation of a static into a dynamic organization, in what I call works of animation. Although …
Social media networks enable frictionless transmission of information, creating a new subject of media analysis: the meme, gathered by both an appeal to relatable affect …
MULTIPLE SELVES is a multimedia project that layers self portrait photography and video, digital painting, animation, and poetry into a short film and accompanying printed …
My dissertation challenges both the assertion and dismissal of identity politics in the humanities through a queer-diasporic overhaul of the concept of "narcissism." Both the …
A project originating from a large-scale research paper in 2014, The Politics of Ambiguity explores the ambiguous networks of Turkish society and social movements in …
This dissertation evaluates how the advent of digital technologies have implicated film and media studies in recent debates over the legacy of critical theory and …
Racial Technics is a cultural, historical, and theoretical study that traces how competing conceptions of humanity and human freedom have been articulated at the nexus …
This thesis addresses the poetics and politics of "ambience" and "atmospherics" in contemporary culture. I am interested in how "ambient practices" often associated with the …
This dissertation reevaluates the history and legacies of the twentieth-century avant-gardes. Focusing on postwar cinema, I reconsider one of the avant-garde’s central preoccupations – the …
A black coming-of-age comedy-drama pilot set in the Obama-era and an accompanying essay that grounds the program in the black televisual archive through relevant theoretical …
This dissertation examines three films by the Italian horror-thriller director Dario Argento set in Rome during the period of social and historical transformation following 1968 …
Laughter has a material history. In my dissertation, "Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes," I argue that comedy has haunted the emergence of cinema …
1. A series of speculative scripts that aim to rewrite exploitive conventions of race films in America. 2. A project that speculates about the extent …
Anticolonialism is trapped in an impossible logic. The opposition to colonialism becomes the means of its persistence. Independence from British rule through the Partition of …
Anticolonialism is trapped in an impossible logic. The opposition to colonialism becomes the means of its persistence. Independence from British rule through the Partition of …
Anticolonialism is trapped in an impossible logic. The opposition to colonialism becomes the means of its persistence. Independence from British rule through the Partition of …
Climate change knowledge emerges from the collection of ecological data on a global scale. Scientists require computer models to aggregate and harmonize disparate forms of …
Representative of the phenomenon of media convergence felt across the globe, the state of contemporary Japanese animation (or anime) is characterized by the proliferation, interrelation …
Debates about the political impact of digital platforms often revolve around a central, limiting dichotomy: Does digital media revitalize or undermine democracy? This project shifts …
This dissertation addresses a conceptual form of negativity in the literature, film, and criticism of the United States during the period just following World War …
This dissertation project takes as its focus the cultural discourses surrounding what has been called the contemporary crisis of neoliberalism, in which “the political” has …
Design has come to serve as a solution to almost every problem from climate change to college grades. “Toward a Utopia Without Revolution: Developmentalism, Globalization, …
Unbound is a digital fiction made of text and images. The images are collages from classic superhero comics and photography. The story combines fiction and …
This dissertation examines the shifts in reproduction, knowledge, and power that remap our notion of "life" in contemporary scientific and popular cultures through the uncanny …
This thesis, through a close reading of a selection of films by the director David Cronenberg (specifically: The Brood, Dead Ringers, Crash, A Dangerous Method), …
This dissertation explores the changing terms of neoliberal culture that are affectively registered in our most dominant media form, television. I examine the affective texture …
What does it mean to bear witness in contemporary Palestinian visual culture? This dissertation analyzes and historicizes Palestinian films and artworks that reconfigure witnessing as …
Worldbuilding in Our World: Queer/Trans Oral Histories of Friends at the Table Fandom documents the experiences of six queer and/or trans fans of the actual …
