Professor of Film and Screen Studies
I'm a film critic and historian based in Syracuse, New York, where I hold an academic appointment at Syracuse University as Professor of Film and Screen Studies in the Department of English and serve as Chair of the department.
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A specialist in U.S. film history, I write about how recognizable filmmakers, stars, and proprietary characters have attained iconic status. This work draws from research on Classical Hollywood, performance and stardom, genres and modes of popular storytelling (horror, noir, melodrama), and transmediality, or the interactions between and among different media (film and television, film and comics).
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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, 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.