Associate Professor and Department Chair, English, Syracuse University
I'm a film critic and historian based at Syracuse University, where I am Associate Professor of Film and Screen Studies in the Department of English and Chair of the department.
A specialist in U.S. film history, I am primarily interested in stardom and performance, genres and modes of popular storytelling (horror, film noir, melodrama), and Classical Hollywood cinema. One of my central research questions asks, how do legendary Hollywood figures (filmmakers, stars, proprietary characters) achieve legibility as classic-film icons?
Currently, I am writing a book under contract with Wayne State University Press about the Universal Classic Monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, The Wolf Man, etc.). 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.