Research Interests in Cinema and Television Studies

• cli-fi (climate fiction) 
• financialization of domestic space
• class, race, gender, and sexuality
• aesthetics and affects of cuteness
• theories of post-cinema
• Hollywood and independent US cinema
• Todd Haynes

Research Plans 2017

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 crisisand its aftermath. 

Publications: Books

• 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, 2016)
• Extreme Weather and Global Media (co-editor with Diane Negra, Routledge, 2015)
• Interviews: Todd Haynes (editor, UP of Mississippi, 2014)

Publications: Peer-Reviewed Journals

• “Cli-Fi in American Studies: A Research Bibliography,” with Susanne Leikam. American Studies Journal 62 (2017). Web.
• “‘What’s in a Name?’: Cli-Fi and American Studies,” with Susanne Leikam. Extended Forum. Amerikastudien / American Studies 62.1 (2017): 109-38. 
• “Female-Centered Television in an Age of Precarity,” with Jorie Lagerwey and Diane Negra. Genders 1.1 (2016). 
• “Demon Debt: Paranormal Activity as Recessionary Post-Cinematic Allegory.” Jump Cut 56 (2014). 
• “‘This Complicated, Colossal Failure’: The Abjection of Creighton Bernette in HBO’s Treme.” Television and New Media 13.3 (2012): 243-60. 
• “An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 5.1 (2011): 66-83. 
• “Space, Class, City: Literary Geographies of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha.” Japanese Journal of American Studies 19 (2008): 123-37. 
• “Geographies of American Studies,” with Sheila Hones. American Quarterly 57.4 (2005): 1019-32. 
• “Towards a Critical Geography of American Studies,” with Sheila Hones. Comparative American Studies 2.2 (2004): 185-203.
• “Black-Audience Westerns and the Politics of Cultural Identification in the 1930s.” Cinema Journal 42.1 (2002): 46-70.
• “Home on the Range: Space, Nation, and Mobility in John Ford’s The Searchers.” Japanese Journal of American Studies 13 (2002): 83-106.
• “Reading White Trash: Class, Race, and Mobility in Faulkner and Le Sueur.” Arizona Quarterly 56.2 (2000): 37-64.

In the Media

• Interview about cli-fi for RBB Online (DE)
• Interview about cli-fi for Avinus (DE) 
• Quotations in a Berliner Morgenpost article about online cat videos (DE)