I am an associate professor of Film and Media Studies at Lafayette College, where I teach classes at all levels of the discipline, including introductions to digital media and contemporary visual culture, film analysis, film history, and film theory, as well as upper-level seminars on the so-called “death of film” (and contemporary moving images), media archaeology and historiography, archive fevers and research methods, and “minor” film and media practices. I was trained in early and silent-era cinema, twentieth-century ethnography and the avant-garde, and film and media theory. When large-scale digitization projects began to transform moving-image collections, my research shifted to consider just what digitization means for the artifactuality and historicity of contemporary images. My current areas of research interest include twentieth and twenty-first century media; contemporary AI, machine learning, and computational art; comparative media studies; feminist media histories; critical theory; archive studies; and philosophies of history and reference.

Before arriving at Lafayette, I directed the Film and Visual Culture program at the University of Aberdeen in northeast Scotland and co-directed the George Washington Wilson Center for Visual Culture. I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Film and Video Studies from Cornell University in June 2009. I received a B.A. in Comparative Literature and French from Emory University in 2002.

I am the author of Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), which explores how we write and think about film history and archival research, and the development of film history as a field in film studies. I am also interested in the intersections between “old” and “new” media (and co-edited a book on the subject).

I was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers for the 2021-2022 academic year to begin research on a new book–tentatively titled Unindexical–at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. In this project, I examine the nature of the relationship between contemporary modes of visual representation and history. I am interested in how contemporary media function as historical artifacts—how they encourage us to mourn, experience nostalgia, or encounter the specters of past time—despite their seeming lack of artifactual authority. You can read more about my published and forthcoming research here.

I used to maintain a blog called Half/Films. Like a lot of blogs, it had a finite lifespan. It got its name from an archivist at the Filmmuseum in Amsterdam who used the term “half films” to describe the scraps of cinema I selected to screen. “Half films” inhabit the vast margins of the archives: untitled, unauthored, seemingly infinite in number, and unrestored even in their digital afterlives. I am still writing and thinking about “half films” even if I am no longer blogging about them. You can find the archives of my posts here.