In general, I study what European scholars call intermediality. I examine the relationships between screen media (film, television, video games, etc.) and other media/art forms (painting, dance, literature, music, etc.). As such, I am interested in the politics of adaptation, representation, authorship, stardom, and taste cultures. Specifically, my recent and current research is concerned with dance and screens.
Dance and media apparati have been involved with one another since the very invention of film. The story begins with Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and their films of various dancers/dances in the 1890s. Today, dance is one of the driving forces of the popular app TikTok, and it appears in major television programs and video games as well. I am fascinated by these relationships between (visual) arts and (kinetic) technologies--and the structural ways that class, race, gender, ability, and body factor into access, creative possibilities, and reception of the resulting media objects.
Dance and media apparati have been involved with one another since the very invention of film. The story begins with Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, and their films of various dancers/dances in the 1890s. Today, dance is one of the driving forces of the popular app TikTok, and it appears in major television programs and video games as well. I am fascinated by these relationships between (visual) arts and (kinetic) technologies--and the structural ways that class, race, gender, ability, and body factor into access, creative possibilities, and reception of the resulting media objects.
Book Project
I am currently at work on a book manuscript that expands upon and refocuses my dissertation research (described below). Stay tuned for more info!
Other Research
MOST RECENT:
I have a short chapter titled "The Nicholas Brothers: Dancing Masculinity in Down Argentine Way (1940)” in Dance in US Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Atkins. It's a textbook-style volume aimed at undergraduates, out now!
ARTICLE SPOTLIGHT:
My article "The Dance Company Film" (Journal of Film and Video, Spring/Summer 2022) introduces a little-known and rarely discussed use of film by and for dance companies.
COMING SOON!:
My article "“Twyla Tharp’s Making Television Dance (1977) and the Technologized Dancing Body" is forthcoming in the International Journal of Screendance. Another article, : “‘World-Famous’: The Nicholas Brothers’ Black Stardom on Television, 1951–1977,” is forthcoming in the New Review of Film and Television Studies.
I also have a chapter titled "Celluloid Dances: How Chicago Women Documented Dance at Midcentury" in the multivolume collection Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories, edited by Lizzie Leopold and Susan Manning. Forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, probably in 2024.
I have a short chapter titled "The Nicholas Brothers: Dancing Masculinity in Down Argentine Way (1940)” in Dance in US Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Atkins. It's a textbook-style volume aimed at undergraduates, out now!
ARTICLE SPOTLIGHT:
My article "The Dance Company Film" (Journal of Film and Video, Spring/Summer 2022) introduces a little-known and rarely discussed use of film by and for dance companies.
COMING SOON!:
My article "“Twyla Tharp’s Making Television Dance (1977) and the Technologized Dancing Body" is forthcoming in the International Journal of Screendance. Another article, : “‘World-Famous’: The Nicholas Brothers’ Black Stardom on Television, 1951–1977,” is forthcoming in the New Review of Film and Television Studies.
I also have a chapter titled "Celluloid Dances: How Chicago Women Documented Dance at Midcentury" in the multivolume collection Dancing on the Third Coast: Chicago Dance Histories, edited by Lizzie Leopold and Susan Manning. Forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, probably in 2024.
Dissertation
Entitled Dancing Race and Masculinity Across Midcentury Screens: The Nicholas Brothers, Gene Kelly, and Elvis Presley on American Film and TV, my dissertation explored the relationship between dance cultures and media cultures in the United States between the 1940s and the 1960s, when both were experiencing a period of multiplicity and flux in their forms. It examined how the two cultures in combination allowed for the working through of major social anxieties of the time: race, specifically in the context of the struggle for desegregation and the Civil Rights Movement; and gender, specifically the crisis of masculinity brought on (in part) by the return of male soldiers from WWII to a changed economic landscape.
In other words, my dissertation not only looked at American dance on screens in the '40s-'60s, but also foregrounded the fact that much of what was (and is) understood as "American" dance is often African American dance and the fact that dance performance was generally viewed as a feminine undertaking at the time. So, over the course of the project, I traced the ways in which blackness was sanitized, appropriated, adapted, and performed by variously privileged bodies, and the ways in which notions of masculinity were entangled in the process. I held that race and masculinity as markers are conflated in the dances themselves, though these markers signify differently when performed by black bodies versus white ones.
More broadly, I argued, performances of and around blackness in dance on popular screens were used to allay anxieties about white American masculinity in society at large during the postwar years, even as actual lived black bodies often remained a major source of anxiety when in proximity to these white bodies. I approached these issues through the lens of some of the era's most famous and prolific performers of dance on screen, particularly the Nicholas brothers, Gene Kelly, and Elvis Presley (pictured above).
In other words, my dissertation not only looked at American dance on screens in the '40s-'60s, but also foregrounded the fact that much of what was (and is) understood as "American" dance is often African American dance and the fact that dance performance was generally viewed as a feminine undertaking at the time. So, over the course of the project, I traced the ways in which blackness was sanitized, appropriated, adapted, and performed by variously privileged bodies, and the ways in which notions of masculinity were entangled in the process. I held that race and masculinity as markers are conflated in the dances themselves, though these markers signify differently when performed by black bodies versus white ones.
More broadly, I argued, performances of and around blackness in dance on popular screens were used to allay anxieties about white American masculinity in society at large during the postwar years, even as actual lived black bodies often remained a major source of anxiety when in proximity to these white bodies. I approached these issues through the lens of some of the era's most famous and prolific performers of dance on screen, particularly the Nicholas brothers, Gene Kelly, and Elvis Presley (pictured above).