How are texts & images significant in our lives?
As an interdisciplinary feminist film and media studies scholar, I assess texts that testify to contemporary lived experiences. My work stresses ethical-political potentials of the (post)cinematic medium as it explores attempts to express the inexpressible.
I am an advanced tenure-track Assistant Professor of Film Studies (2023 Interim Director; 2024 Director; Associate Professor from 2026) at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Until August 2022, I was Assistant Professor of Audiovisual Cultures & the Moving Image in the Institute for Media & Cultural Studies, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, and Guest Lecturer at the University of Cologne (Departments of American Literary and Cultural Studies, and Romance Studies).
After obtaining my PhD in Film-Philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Department of French, Newnham College), I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Edinburgh (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities), Brown University (Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women), and the University of New South Wales (Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia).
From 2016-19, I was Senior Lecturer (permanent Associate Professor) in Film at Falmouth University (UK), before moving to the University of Cologne in 2019, where I was a Research Fellow at the Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies (Käte Hamburger Center for Excellence), and in NYC, a Visiting Fellow at Parsons New School for Design (Center for Transformative Media, director, Edward Keller). Prior to my PhD, I was a University of Aberdeen Predoctoral Film Teaching Fellow.
I completed my Honours BA in English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and MA in Theoretical, Critical, Historical Film and Media Studies at York University Canada. As the youngest child of working-class immigrants (1st generation), I value ‘real life’ experiences and mentoring as I work to accommodate and listen to all students.
Research Fields
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cinema and media cultures; theories & history of analogue and digital, still and moving images
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feminist portraiture; transnational ecocinema (esp. documentary)
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film-philosophy, contemporary continental philosophy; modern socio-political thought
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screen affect vis-à-vis ethics, temporality, subjectivity; literary trauma & memory studies
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media & crip studies
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multisensory screen studies
Recent/Forthcoming 2024-26 Invited Talks and Conferences
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Invited Introductory Talk, 'Eyes Wide Open: Béla Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies (2000).' 2026 Annual 'Through a Glass Darkly' Symposium (2026 theme: 'Time and the Eschaton'). Underwritten by the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs Humanities Program, the Heller Center for Arts & Humanities, the Department of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University Montréal, the School of Religious Studies at McGill University, and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada / Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada. March 16-17, 2026.
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Invited Panelist: Paper, 'Cinema’s nonstyle: Cinécriture via Varda'; Panel, 'Between Deleuze and Literature: Imagining Literature’s Images of Thought.' American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA). Distinguished Professor Arkady Plotnitsky (Purdue), and others, co-panelists. May 29-June 1, 2025.
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Organizer and Host: UCCS Symposium & Workshop: ‘Disability, Deafness, and the Body Onscreen’ with Lisa Cartwright (UCSD), Lennard J. Davis (UIC), Alyson Patsavas (UIC), Lawrence Carter-Long (activist; Turner Classic Movies), Alison O’Daniel (filmmaker), Tracey Salaway (Gallaudet), Tom Shepard & Mari Moxley (Youth Documentary Academy, and YDA graduates). Organized & hosted by Nadine Boljkovac, Film Studies, Department of Visual & Performing Arts in collaboration with the Department of Languages & Cultures, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, April 16-18, 2024.
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Chair, Pre-constituted Conference Panel: ‘Disability Onscreen.’ Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). Nadine Boljkovac, chair/organizer/co-panelist. Professor Lisa Cartwright (UCSD); Distinguished Professor Lennard J. Davis (UIC); Asst Professor/Writer/Producer Alyson Patsavas (UIC); co-panelists. Boston, Massachusetts, March 2024.
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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 2, 2025: 'Chris Marker: Early Film Writings by Chris Marker'
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The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy (Bloomsbury)
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Camera Obscura (May 2021, #106, Duke University Press)
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Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies (Peter Lang)
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“Materialising Absence in Film and Media” (co-edited with Saige Walton for Screening the Past)
Little Women (2019): Movies Minute by Minute (forthcoming w/Bloomsbury) is the first title in the Timecodes series (co-eds Nicholas Rombes & Nadine Boljkovac) to embrace a trans and feminist temporality of possibility. Revisiting insights from Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (2013, and 2015 paperwork), and Little Women (2019), a third monograph in progress, Beyond Herself: Disabled Feminist Filmic Portraiture, interweaves thoughts on affect, time, perception, and event theory to assess emergences of ‘self-portraits’ across transmedia works by female artists. Integrating disability studies with film and visual culture analyses, Beyond Herself advances ecofeminist and queer ecological readings. Portions of this monograph have been published in The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy (chapter, “Vardian lessons: from sea to screen and beyond,” Bloomsbury, 2022); Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies (article, “She Listened: Vardian Self-Portraiture and Auto-Refrains of Sea, Wind, and Sand,” Duke University Press, 2021); and a special issue of Screening the Past: A Peer-Reviewed Journal of Screen History, Theory & Criticism, “Materialising Absence in Film and Media,” (co-eds Saige Walton & Nadine Boljkovac) (article, “In [No] Home Movie Style: Her Death and Rebirth,” 2018). Each published work has arisen by invitation for top tier book and journal collections including the chapter “Screen Perception and Event: Beyond the Formalist/Realist Divide” in The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory (w/contributions by founding/leading film studies scholars). The chapter, “Mad Love,” in Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text, written at the start of my PhD, appears next a piece by Deleuze’s former student, philosopher Éric Alliez.
Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (2013; paperback 2015) is the 14th title in the Edinburgh University Press philosophy book series, Plateaus: New Directions in Deleuze Studies, and is the series’ first transdisciplinary title. Untimely Affects examines possibilities for art and film following modern events (including the Holocaust and Hiroshima) that defy representation and humanity. Through theorizations of the event, affect, time, intersubjectivity, and the cinema itself, and via works by transmedia ciné-poets, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, the book explores dimensions of history and memory as it evinces an ethics of cinema that can reveal past-future implications. Untimely Affects dialogues with the poststructuralist thoughts of Deleuze as well as Roland Barthes, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière, and others. (Reviewed by Özgür Çiçek for Film-Philosophy [20: 2-3, 2016]; Colin Gardner for Deleuze Studies [9:2, 264-272, 2015].)