Author Biography
After completing my PhD in Communications at McGill University, I went to Scotland to undertake a post-doctoral fellowship on minor national cinemas at the University of Glasgow. Before coming to Queen’s, I taught at universities in the UK and Canada.
My most recent research addresses global Arctic moving images cultures; film manifestos; process and handmade films; national and transnational identity in global cinemas; re-imagining Hollywood cinemas; and Situationist practices and moving image activism. My published books and articles reflect these interests. I have recently co-edited three books on Critical Arctic Studies. The first, Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (co-edited with Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Edinburgh University Press, 2015), is the first book to address the vast diversity of Arctic cinemas from a transnational perspective. With chapters on polar explorer films, silent cinema, documentaries, ethnographic and Indigenous film, gender and ecology, as well as Hollywood and the USSR’s uses and abuses of the Arctic, this book provides the first account of Arctic cinemas from 1898 to the present. The second volume, part of the Palgrave Studies in World Environmental History series, entitled Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Polar Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene (co-edited with Lill-Ann Körber and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), offers a diverse and groundbreaking account of the intersections between modernities and environments in the circumpolar global North, foregrounding the Arctic as a critical space of modernity, where the past, present, and future of the planet’s environmental and political systems are projected and imagined. Investigating the Arctic region as a privileged site of modernity, this book articulates the globally significant, but often overlooked, junctures between environmentalism and sustainability, Indigenous epistemologies and scientific rhetoric, and decolonization strategies and governmentality. The third volume, Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (co-edited with Lilya Kaganovsky and Anna Stenport, Indiana University Press, 2019), examines the global history in Arctic documentary moving images. The project culminates with the co-authored monograph New Arctic Cinemas: Media Sovereignty and the Climate (w/ Anna Stenport, University of California Press, 2023).
