Teaching

I have been teaching film and media courses in the classroom since 2015, having taught at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate level. I tend to view all my classes as a combined seminar/lecture style format, which I have found to the most successful pedagogical style in an era of overmediated distraction and the lie of digital technology's lure to do the work of thinking for you.

Having been a student at a number of different institutions, public and private, community college and Ivy grad school, I fundamentally believe in each student's ability to understand concepts no matter how "difficult" to the extent of their interest and investment. I know this is an idealistic thing professors often say, high on a supply of a life lived as a calling, but for me it is a political project. Some of the best classes I have ever taken were at community college, some of the worst, Ivy League schools. In an age in which the institutions of higher education are collapsing both from the decades-long project of neoliberalism and direct assault from the state for ideological reasons, I think it is our duty as teachers to shepherd and protect the intellectual traditions we have been trusted with remembering into the future. Data centers which now hold paywalled PDFs of what university libraries used to protect in book form will not outlive their own decay; the ancient technology of memory and oral communication have long proven to be the only reliable method of transmitting knowledge across generations. So without idealizing the work I do, or submitting to whatever new neoliberal pedagogical exercise we imagine to "flip" the classroom or "unthink" the university, my job is to know things and tell people about them, in whatever format I have at my disposal.

Below you can find a selection of courses I have taught in the institution of the university, ordered by date and location.

Critical Theory of Cinema: a survey course covering the history of film theory.
History of Cinema and Narrative Media, I and II: a survey course covering film theory using World War Two as the key periodizing break, as well as media such as radio and digital.
Conspiracy Theory: one of my core seminar offerings, analyzing contemporary conspiracy culture using Fredric Jameson's notion of conspiracy as a failed cognitive map.
Post-Cinema: core seminar focused on debates around cinema's digital transition
Futures of Nostalgia: another core seminar offering on nostalgia as a media logic and aesthetic form, as well as the problem of the difficulty of imagining the future under late capitalism
What Was Hollywood?: seminar on Hollywood history
Screening Capital: graduate seminar on the representability of capital in film and digital media, using Giovanni Arrighi's periodization
Apocalypse Cinema: genre course
Digital Cultures: survey of digital media theory

Cinematic Futures: early version of my nostalgia seminar
Theories of Visual Culture: survey of visual studies and art history
Sports, Media, Culture: sports and media history

Film Theory
Introduction to Film Studies

Post-Cinema? New Media and the Digital Turn (Summer@Brown)
Screening Capital
Film After Film: An Introduction to Digital Cinema
Post-Cinema? Histories and Politics in the 'Digital Revolution': Introductory offering of my ongoing Post-Cinema syllabus
Introduction to Film Analysis (Summer@Brown)
History of American Film (Summer@Brown)
Various courses TA'd in Modern Culture and Media

Cinejourneys.com: I will be teaching two courses--Film Theory and Genre Theory--for Cinejourneys.com