Julia Leyda

Research Interests in Cinema and Television Studies

• cli-fi (climate fiction) and screen cultures of the Anthropocene
• financialization of domestic space
• intersectional feminist theory and criticism
• aesthetics and affects of cuteness
• Hollywood cinema and popular culture
• Todd Haynes

Research Plans 2018

This year I plan to move forward my two in-progress monographs: 

• The Cultural Affordances of Cli-Fi: 21st-Century Scenarios of Climate Futures. This book will place the newly minted category “cli-fi” in the broader context of fiction, films, and television programming that tackle a constellation of topics related to environmentalism and sustainability. I argue that cli-fi offers a new set of representational possibilities through its combination of generic flexibility and media buzz. In notable ways setting itself apart from earlier offerings, cli-fi speaks to twenty-first-century concerns and contexts. This research can provide insight not only into the topic of climate change but also the “structures of feeling” that circulate around it. 
• Home Economics: The Financialization of Domestic Space. This book brings together film and media studies work on the recession with the relatively new field of critical finance studies to fill a gap in current scholarship on the representations of home at the turn of the twenty-first century. Taking as a point of departure that the recession was as much a cultural crisis it was an economic one, as Mark Hayward argues, it investigates the housing bubble and crash through in-depth analyses of a wide range of representations in screen culture. It takes up US television, film, and new media in an examination of how these forms contribute to the ongoing twenty-first-century reconfiguration of discourses of home and family within the context of the housing crisis and its aftermath. 

Books

• Reframing Todd Haynes: Feminism's Indelible Mark (co-editor with Theresa L. Geller, Duke UP, forthcoming 2020)
• The Aesthetics and Affects of Cuteness (co-editor with Joshua Paul Dale, Joyce Goggin, Anthony P. McIntyre, and Diane Negra, Routledge, 2017)
• Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (co-editor with Shane Denson, REFRAME, 2016)
• American Mobilities: Geographies of Class, Race, and Gender in US Culture (Transcript-Columbia UP, 2016)
• Extreme Weather and Global Media (co-editor with Diane Negra, Routledge, 2015)
• Interviews: Todd Haynes (editor, UP of Mississippi, 2014)

In the Media

• Interviewed on US television reboots in Morning Consult (US)
• Cited on Occupied in El País (ES)
• Interviewed on The Handmaid's Tale in Die Welt (DE)
• Cited on US television revivals in The Conversation (US), picked up in SFGate (US), Scroll (IN), Houston Chronicle (US)
• Interviewed with co-editor on cuteness for New York Magazine (US)
• Interviewed on kawaii for Gemini (NO)
• Interviewed on cli-fi for RBB Online (DE)
• Interviewed on cli-fi for Avinus (DE) 
• Interviewed on online cat videos in Berliner Morgenpost (DE)