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What can a 'film' do, and how?

 

As an interdisciplinary feminist film and media studies scholar, I assess images that testify to contemporary lived experiences. My work stresses ethical-political potentials of the (post)cinematic medium as it explores how the cinema attempts to convey what defies straightforward representation. 

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I am an advanced tenure-track Assistant Professor of Film Studies (2023 Interim Director; 2024 Director) in the Department of Visual & Performing Arts (VAPA) 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 2018-19 Research Fellow at the Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies (Käte Hamburger Center for Excellence), and in NYC, an August-October 2018 Visiting Fellow at Parsons New School for Design (Center for Transformative Media, director, Edward Keller). Prior to my PhD, I was a 2009-10 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.

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As the first in my immediate and extended working-class immigrant family to pursue postgraduate studies (1st gen.) in Canada, and as a woman whose beliefs and trajectories diverge from the ‘norms’ of the culture in which I was born, I attempt to accommodate and listen to all students.  

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​Ongoing and most recent courses have included not only core introductory surveys (“Introduction to
Film & Media” and “Transnational Narrative Cinema”) but also my specializations: “Feminist Ecocinema,” “Disability, Deafness, and the Body Onscreen,” “Political Cinema,” “Screen Ethics and Film-Philosophy,” and “Cinematic (Self)Portraiture.” Each course is entirely or partially devoted to depictions of disability, deafness, and various bodies in relation to gender, race, and class analyses. Our screenings and readings foreground works by minorities including women, nonwestern, brown, and black filmmakers, and focus on experiences of grief, kinship, care, and survival. We consider politics of filmmaking, transnationalism, exile and diaspora; gender & sexuality politics (incl. nonhuman, crip, trans, non-binary & queer readings); race and class analyses; and ecocinema. ​

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Research Fields

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  • cinema and media cultures; theories & history of analogue and digital, still and moving images

  • disability and feminist portraiture; transnational ecocinema (esp. documentary)

  • film-philosophy, contemporary continental philosophy; modern socio-political thought

  • screen affect vis-à-vis ethics, temporality, subjectivity; international trauma & memory studies

  • media & crip studies (disability studies with sexuality studies, incl. trans and non-binary studies)

  • cinema and Deaf studies; multisensory screen studies​​

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Forthcoming 2024​

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  • UCCS Symposium & Workshop: ‘Disability, Deafness, and the Body Onscreen’ with Lennard J. Davis (UIC), Lisa Cartwright (UCSD), Alyson Patsavas (UIC), Lawrence Carter-Long (activist; Turner Classic Movies), Alison O’Daniel (filmmaker), Tracey Salaway (Gallaudet), Tom Shepard & Mari Moxley (Youth Documentary Academy). 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 2024.

  • 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.

 

Recent peer-reviewed works appear in

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I am completing two books: Little Women (2019): Movies Minute by Minute (contracted for Nicholas Rombes & Nadine Boljkovac's Bloomsbury book series, Timecodes), and Beyond Herself: Disabled Feminist Filmic Portraiture. A transdisciplinary book collection (co-edited with Hanjo Berressem) is also in progress which is inspired by the spatial and visual concept of a triptych as expressed in practice and philosophy.

My first monograph, 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 that defy representation and humanity. Through theorizations of the event, affect, time, intersubjectivity, and the cinema itself, and via works by documentarian/multimedia artists/photo-essayists/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].)

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