Ph.D., University of Oregon, 1996.
As a film historian, I analyze the history of Hollywood studio management of film production, stars, publicity, and public relations, as well as the history of censorship, particularly through the Production Code, and I use feminist and queer theories and histories to analyze films and the coded representations of stars' gender and sexuality. I am currently researching the relationship between the Kinsey Institute and experimental filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s and completing a study of the decades-long struggle between gay fans and Hollywood to control star discourse. My publications include "Gay Culture, Studio Publicity, and the Management of Star Discourse: The Homosexualization of William Haines in Pre-Code Hollywood" (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2003) and "Queer Representation and Oregon's 1992 Anti-Gay Ballot Measure: Measuring the Politics of Mainstreaming" (In Between the Sheets, In the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, 1997). My 1996 dissertation at the University of Oregon was on "The Representation and Censorship of Male Homosexuality in Hollywood Film, 1930-1935."
As the Programming Director for The Department of Cinema and Media Studies, I organize and coordinate CMS's role in special film screenings, visits by filmmakers and scholars, CMS conferences, and other events. Last year, for instance, CMS co-sponsored a pre-release special screening of Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her with the university's student film society DOC Films, helped bring film director Terrence Malick to campus as the Margaret Kovler Fellow, and co-sponsored campus visits by filmmaker Su Friedrich, film historian Charles Musser, and theorists Garrett Stewart and Jacques Ranciere. Besides events at the university, I have curated film and video programming for the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, the South African Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, Chicago's Gerber-Hart Gay and Lesbian Library, the St. Cloud LGBT Film Festival, and other community and academic organizations.
As Lecturer in Cinema and Media Studies, I focus on Classical Hollywood cinema (CMST 28600/48600, CMST 21300); the history of queer representation in Hollywood, documentary, and experimental film (CMST 20900/30900); the construction and management of stars; the representation of gender and sexuality in the media (CMST 26300/36300); spectatorship; political economy of the media; experimental film and video; the history of media censorship; and theoretical and aesthetic issues in digital media. I am also affiliated with the Center for Gender Studies and The Lesbian and Gay Studies Project. I have held appointments as an assistant professor of film studies at Northwestern University and St. Cloud State University, and have also taught at Duke University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
