dissertation

I received my PhD in the Film and Visual Studies program at Harvard University in 2023. My dissertation, Reforming the Common Boundary: An Ethic of Technical Media, was supervised by Giuliana Bruno on a committee featuring scholars including Eugenie Brinkema and Laura Frahm. This two-part work combines intellectual history and formal analysis to activate the ethical potential of media theory. “Media,” the first part argues, is not a term that merely  refers to specific objects, platforms, or operations that mediate. As a conceptual noun derived from Aristotelian philosophy, the term is fundamentally conceptual – and spurs consideration of how environmental, technological, and ideological dimensions of modern life engender and hinder human flourishing.

While media critique tends to  consider ways that technologies deform our collective environments, Part Two exemplifies the potential of an alternate intellectual approach. It demonstrates how the media concept may also spur engagement with how sensory experience, shaped by technical form, may reform our ethical sensibilities for the better. By engaging Isaac Julien’s ten-screen installation Lessons of the Hour (2019) – a work that considers and draws on Frederick Douglass’s ethical theories of photography – as well as the film Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham, 2018), part two demonstrates how close attention to media forms may expand our conceptions of collective flourishing.

This dissertation concludes by suggesting that further work is needed to consider the positive potential of media theory. For instance, scholarship should consider the relationship between "entertainment" and “hospitality,” in order to pursue the kind of hospitality we imply when we speak of entertaining ideas or guests. Such hospitality, I argue, requires attention to forms that may reform our sociopolitical life. We should entertain film, and think closely about positive means of entertaining film.

In addtion to my dissertation, I have written about the installation “Everything and More” by Rachel Rose for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the films Pig (Michael Sarnoski, 2021) and The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021) for the online magazine Between Lands.