My scholarship encompasses media theory and history, historical materialism, critical work on race and racialization, queer and decolonial theories, the history of affect, and radical formalist approaches to media. Broadly, I am interested in the ways socio-cultural production can be mapped against their political-economic determinants and effects through close formal analyses of critical theory and visual media.
My monograph, Processes of Abjection, which is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press, provides a critical re-evaluation of psychoanalytic theories of abjection and their deployment in film and media studies via a close analysis of a range of media objects including case studies from horror cinema, speculative fiction, contemporary art and reality television. Situating cinematic and artistic representations of the monstrous and the disgusting within critical, cultural, and socio-political contexts, Processes of Abjection offers a new politically-orientated method of analysing abjection in media. My research has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT: Literary Interpretation Theory, The Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and Social Text, amongst other venues.
Research Interests and PhD Supervision
- Aesthetics
- Critical theory (especially Marxism, decolonial scholarship, queer theory, and critical work on race and racialisation)
- Film and Media Studies (especially popular culture and genre studies)
- Literary Theory
- Horror cinema / extreme cinema(s)
- Histories of Settler Colonialism (especially North America and Australia)
Teaching
I teach classes on critical theory, media history and theory, and contemporary cinema including specialist topics such as ‘Queer Decolonial Approaches to Film Analysis’ and ‘Speculative Cinemas’. I am also the coordinator for the first-year core BA course ‘Media Aesthetics’.
