Staff and Faculty Directory

I have always found comfort in books and movies, and I love that they tell us so much about ourselves: where we come from, who we are, how we interact with history and our own contexts.

One of the foundations of my pedagogy is that popular culture is essential in determining how our society responds to one another and the world. It provides a snapshot of what captured human imagination at a given time and a historical record of what we have considered important in our society. Popular culture is formative for all of us, and one of my goals is to demonstrate the importance of understanding how we create it and how, in turn, it creates us.

I’m particularly interested in classical Hollywood cinema and its depictions of sexuality, gender, and wartime politics. My work involves looking for clues to trace the trajectory of marginalized bodies, their agency, and their treatment in these “classic” films that have informed so much of our current context. I’ve written about women on the home front during wartime, prisoners of war trying to make sense of the relationship between nationalism and their imprisonment, and the ways in which screwball comedies use humour to talk about fascism, sexism, poverty, and more, and my research always leads me to think about what has and has not changed.

I have also come to understand that studying the art we make and consume is crucial to Booth UC’s educational goals of hope, justice, and mercy because through art we can learn who we are and how we can move beyond what is merely practical to what is possible.