Professor and Department Chair
Film and Screen Studies, Department of English
College of Arts and Sciences, Syracuse University
I hold a Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington, where I pursued Film and Media Studies in the Department of Communication and Culture, and I joined the faculty at Syracuse University in 2015.
As Professor of Film and Screen Studies in the Department of English​​, I specialize in U.S. film history, with research and teaching interests in Classical Hollywood, performance and stardom, genres and modes of popular storytelling (horror, noir, melodrama), and transmedia phenomena, or phenomena that span different media (film, television, comics).
Currently, I am writing a book under contract with Wayne State University Press about the Universal Classic Monsters, among whom include Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Invisible Man, the Mummy, and the Wolf Man. Exploring the impact of film circulation and paratextual material on the creation of a canon, this project undertakes a kind of monster-hunt across time: from the studio period, when the serialization of horror films made Universal Pictures synonymous with the genre, to the franchise era, when the Universal monsters gained afterlives as brand ambassadors for a media conglomerate. The book is tentatively titled Monsters in the Movie Lab: Universal Pictures and Classic Hollywood Horror.