Academic Scholarship

Bright Lights Film Journal • August 2024

The Imperial Presidency after Trump v. United States: On the 30th Anniversary of Clear and Present Danger

On its 30th anniversary, the film feels remarkably relevant in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercising “core” executive powers.

PopMatters • August 2017

On 'Game of Thrones' and Its Problematic Nod to John Ford Westerns

With Game of Thrones' massive cultural power comes responsibility. Alas, the John Ford homage "The Spoils of War" episode fails to address "savage Indian" stereotypes.

ABC-CLIO / Greenwood • July 2017

Race in American Film: Voices and Visions That Shaped a Nation

This expansive three-volume set investigates racial representation in film, providing an authoritative cross-section of the most racially significant films, actors, directors, and movements in American cinematic history.

Booklist • October 2017

Booklist_Review

Booklist Positive Review of Race in Film Encyclopedia

Film International • July 2019

The Replicant Singularity in Blade Runner 2049

While other sci-fi movies dramatize the singularity as occurring through a transcendence away from the biological, Blade Runner 2049 shows AIs achieving the singularity by becoming more biological.

Bright Lights Film Journal • May 2017

Los Angeles Cinema and the Utopia of La La Land

Few movies have represented LA with such fawning reverence and nostalgia as La La Land. There is little traffic (after the opening scene), no crime (other than Ryan Gosling’s singing), no industrialism, no poverty, no homelessness, and very little cultural or geographical diversity.

Senses of Cinema • October 2014

Cinema, Race and the Zeitgeist: On Pulp Fiction Twenty Years Later

Generation X was primed for a movie like Pulp Fiction. Its narrative and visual and aural pastiche, spitting pop cultural allusions like sparks from a grinding wheel, spoke a language we instinctively understood. Pulp Fiction didn’t define us so much as it revealed us, by dramatizing our sensibilities to the world.

Bright Lights Film Journal • May 2012

Glasnost in Space Revisited: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Aging — and the rigidity in thinking it can engender — is one of the themes of The Undiscovered Country. Especially given the obstinacy that defines our current cultural and political thinking, the movie’s twentieth anniversary is an apt moment to revisit the final voyage of the original crew.

Journal of Film and Video • May 2013

Screenwriting Representation: Teaching Approaches to Writing Queer Characters

The author analyzes the way in which queer identity is represented in cinema and then discusses strategies for teaching students how to avoid stereotypes while screenwriting queer characters.

Oxford Bibliographies Online • September 2014

Whiteness - Cinema and Media Studies - Oxford Bibliographies

Annotated bibliography that compiles canonical critical whiteness studies scholarship.

Oxford Bibliographies Online • October 2011

Star Trek - Cinema and Media Studies - Oxford Bibliographies

Annotated bibliography that compiles canonical Star Trek scholarship.

The Conversation • February 2015

American Sniper perpetuates Hollywood's typical Arab stereotypes

Despite what could be described as more racially progressive work in earlier films – Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters From Iwo Jima (2006), Gran Torino (2008) – Eastwood engages in traditional patterns of racial representation in American Sniper.

January 2013

Securing the Virtual Frontier for Whiteness in Tron

The author analyzes Tron (1982) in terms of critical whiteness studies in an essay collection gathering recent scholarship on representations of diversity in Disney and Disney/Pixar films,

Journal of Film and Video • December 2010

JFV Book Review - Green, Michael