Film Theory Research

My scholarly work traverses media objects from transatlantic Latin American, Spanish, and U.S. postmodernity to elucidate the changing conditions of embodied experience and the possibility for practices of epistemic resistance under precarious political and economic conditions. I depart from Walter Benjamin’s observation that industrial modernity, with its explosion of technologies of mechanical reproducibility, reorganized the human sensorium around speed and shock. This vast reorganization of the senses, in turn, demanded that mass art forms like film serve as a training ground for helping humans to develop perceptive strategies for coping with the increasingly traumatic, fragmented character of modern life. Across the different projects that comprise my research agenda, my work reflects an abiding concern with how media produces historical shifts in the human sensorium. As a critic, I take up media objects whose aesthetic strangeness exposes fissures within our ingrained habits of perceiving audiovisual media. By examining these fissures, I argue we can better understand the dominant epistemic-sensory modes imposed by hyper-mediated culture, as well as how aesthetically challenging works poses opportunities for rupturing these ingrained habits of perceiving. Further, by attending to the novel sociality and reception contexts in which these objects circulate, I show how different communities use media to craft oppositional practices and identities against a globalized media system.

Peer Reviewed Film Scholarship

Ritual, Cult Spectatorship, and the Problem of Women’s Flesh in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Midnight Movies
Feminist Media Histories, vol. 6 issue 3, Excavations Embodiment 1, July 2020

ASMR: Auratic Encounters and Women’s Affective Labor
JUMPCUT, April 2018

Non-Refereed Essays

2 Untitled essays on Colombian cinema
SET issue 3