on film and media
As a scholar, I am particularly interested in the way the viewer interacts with media and moving images, the politics of art and cultural production, and the mythologies created by pop culture
[and what strategies we can use to subvert them].
A selection of my work includes…
Pursuing a Horizon Ever Receding- Steps Toward a Strategy of Metamodern Cinema. 2016.
Master’s Thesis.
This work proposes a combination of strategies for a cinema of metamodernism, including multiple perspectives, movement within time and space, and the adaptation of formal qualities that rely on mood, tone, and music as methods of constructing film structure. In addition to providing a theoretical framework for these strategies, this work applies them through the feature screenplay, Bravado.
Girls with Guns: Gender and Violence in Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers. 2014.
Harmony Korine’s neon film combines femininity and violence in an atypical manner, to present the audience with an unexpected and often uncomfortable experience. At the center of this work lie a series of audience interviews on the violence of the film and how it fulfills and subverts expectation.
Your Turntable’s Not Dead: Third Man Records and the Music Label within a Shifting Mediascape. 2014.
Many consider the music label as an outdated institution doomed to fail in the time of digital music. Jack White’s thriving independent label, Third Man Records, however, exemplifies a new dynamic model of the record label as a community meeting place, production space, music venue, and much more.
Fascination, Alienation, and Realisms in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, Elephant, and Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere. 2012.
The realist traditions of cinema have held tight to its narrative and technical conventions of portraying the struggle of the everyman. Contemporary filmmakers Sofia Coppola and Gus Van Sant take those realist cinematic conventions to explore the lore of pop culture and its sensationalist figures and events- rockstars, Hollywood icons, and school shootings, bridging cinema and reality in exciting new ways.
Remediating Femininity: Womanhood, the Retro, and Lana Del Rey. 2013.
Lana del Rey’s first album, Born to Die, unsettled many music fans and critics, who argued that her themes of doomed romance and female desire for love were deeply problematic and anti-feminist. But a more thorough examination of del Rey’s use of the retro both technically and narratively throughout three music videos of this era exposes a much more complex vision of gender and femininity.