Professor of Media & Cinema Studies
Director of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies
Education
- Ph.D., Media and Cinema Studies, University of Chicago, 2008
- M.A., Film and Television, University of Amsterdam, 2001
- M.A., Art History, Indiana University, 1998
- B.S., Modern Languages, Georgetown University, 1993
Affiliations
- Professor of Media and Cinema Studies
- Director, Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies
- Coordinator for Film Studies
- 0% Appointment in Comparative Literature
- 0% Appointment in English
- 0% Appointment in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Course Specialties
- Survey of World Cinema I and II
- Film Theory and Criticism (graduate and undergraduate)
- Special Effects: History and Aesthetics
- History of Film Criticism
- Historiography of Cinema (graduate level)
- Digital Cinema
- Cinema of the 1970s
- Women鈥檚 Cinema (graduate level)
- Topics in Contemporary Cinema
- American Cinema of the 1980s
Awards
- 2024, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
- 2009-2010, Andrew W. Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowship, Recent Doctoral Recipients, Davis Institute of the Humanities, University of California, Davis
Research and Creative Endeavor
Books:
The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism (University of Texas Press, 2022).
Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2015).
Selected Articles:
鈥淛urassic Park鈥檚 Smoothing Pass: The Dinosaur Input Device and Digital Materialism,鈥� The Jurassic Park Book: New Perspectives on the Classic 1990s Blockbuster,” Matt Melia ed. (Bloomsbury Academic Press, November 2023.)
鈥淭he Auteurist Special Effects Film: Kubrick鈥檚 2001: A Space Odyssey and the 鈥楽ingle-Generation Look.鈥欌�� In The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema’s Most Celebrated Era, Peter Kr盲mer and Yannis Tzioumakis eds. (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018): 71-90.
鈥淪pecial Effects: Auteur Renaissance, 1968-1980鈥� and 鈥淪pecial Effects: Post-War Hollywood, 1947-1967鈥� in Editing and Special Visual Effects: Behind the Silver Screen, volume eds. Charles Keil and Kristen Whissel, series ed. Jon Lewis (Rutgers University Press/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2016): 116-128.
“Patient Research on the Slapstick Lots: From Trick Men to Special Effects Artists in Silent Hollywood,鈥� Early Popular Visual Culture 13:2 (2015): 152-173.
“鈥橳he True Stars of Star Wars?鈥�: Experimental Filmmakers the in 1970s and 1980s Special Effects Industry.鈥� Film History 26.4 (2014): 120-145.
鈥淩emoving the Pane of Glass: The Hobbit, 3D High Frame Rate Filmmaking, and the Rhetoric of Cinematic Realism,鈥� Film Criticism (Spring/Summer 2013): 30-59.
鈥淭he ILM Version: Recent Digital Effects and the Aesthetics of 1970s Cinematography鈥� Film History 24:2 (2012): 158-168.
鈥淭he Screen on the Set: The Problem of Classical Studio Rear Projection,鈥� Cinema Journal 51.2 (Winter, February 2012): 157-162.
Related Links
Video
Explanation of special effects as part of the Audiovisual Lexicon for Media Analysis:
