Film Studies Faculty
Core Faculty
Marsha Gordon
Professor, English
Office: 257 Tompkins; 919-515-4164
Dr. Gordon is director of the Film Studies program. With the support of a National Humanities Center fellowship and an NEH Public Scholar Award, she published Becoming the Ex-Wife: The Unconventional Life & Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott (University of California Press) in 2023. With Robert Kolker, she co-wrote the 5th edition of the introduction to film textbook, Film, Form, and Culture (Routledge, 2024).
Since joining the film studies faculty in 2002, she has taught such courses as 21st Century Documentary Filmmaking, Women and Film, Film History to 1940, 1950s American Film, Studio Era Hollywood, The Musical, and directors classes focused on filmmakers like Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk, Sam Fuller, Alfred Hitchcock, and Billy Wilder.
Dr. Gordon has published and co-edited four other books: Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies (Oxford UP, 2017); with Dr. Allyson Nadia Field, Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film (Duke UP, 2019); with Dan Streible and Devin Orgeron, Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (Oxford UP, 2012); and Hollywood Ambitions: Celebrity in the Movie Age (Wesleyan UP, 2008). She has published articles in such journals as The American Archivist, Film History, The Velvet Light Trap, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, and The Moving Image. She also co-directs short art-focused documentaries that have won awards and played at festivals in the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Send email to Dr. Marsha Gordon
Dr. Gordon’s webpage: marshagordon.org
Tommy Jenkins
Lecturer, English
Office: 111 Tompkins
Tommy Jenkins studied film at Columbia University and Fiction Writing at North Carolina State University, where he earned his MFA in 2007. He is the author of a graphic novel, Drawing the Vote (Abrams Books, 2020), and co-author of Writing Movies (Bloomsbury, 2008). Mr. Jenkins’s short fiction has appeared in The Raleigh Review and Gut Cult magazine; his short films have screened at film festivals and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Buster Keaton, Buster Keaton (1998) won best comedy at the Polo Ralph Lauren/New Line Columbia Film Festival. In 2024, the NC State Library published his open resource screenwriting textbook, From Idea to Screen: The Basics of Screenwriting
Andrew R. Johnston
Associate Professor, English
Office: 230 Tompkins; 919-515-4150
Dr. Johnston teaches in the Film Studies Program and is the Associate Director for the PhD program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media. His research and teaching areas include film history and theory, animation, avant-garde film, color aesthetics, media archaeology, and areas of the digital humanities such as the history of computational technologies and digital archives. His recent book, Pulses of Abstraction: Episodes from a History of Animation (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), is a theoretical and historical investigation of abstract animation in cinema and computational media from the 1950s through the 1970s. Examining a rich array of techniques—including etching directly onto the filmstrip, immersive colored-light spectacles, rapid montage sequences, and digital programming—Pulses of Abstraction uncovers important epistemological shifts around film and related media. He has also written a series of articles about the historical development of Computer-Generated Imagery from the 1960s through the 1980s and methods of archiving and transcoding these works on contemporary platforms. His current research investigates the history of Artificial Intelligence from the mid-twentieth century.
Dr. Johnston has a PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago. In addition to his book, his research on film history, aesthetic theory, media archaeology, and avant-garde film has appeared in books and journals such as Animating Film Theory, Color and the Moving Image, Animation: Behind the Silver Screen, and Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, and the forthcoming edited volume Hardwired Temporalities: Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time.
Send email to Dr. Andrew Johnston
Yasheng She
Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies
Dr. Yasheng She teaches in Film Studies and in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD program. His work bridges cultural studies, gender and queer theory, and Asian/Asian American studies, with a particular focus on anime and games (both analog and digital) as visual culture. His Ph.D. is from UC Santa Cruz’s Film and Digital Media Department with an emphasis in Computational Media
Dr. She’s current project investigates how public memories of historical events shape (post)apocalyptic imaginations in global media. His scholarship has been published in peer-reviewed journals and edited collections, including “Designing the Global Body: Japan’s Postwar Modernity in Death Stranding” Made in Asia/America (Duke University Press, 2023) and “The Death of Aerith: Traumatic Femininity and Japan’s Postwar Modernity” in The World of Final Fantasy VII (McFarland, 2023).
Dr. She’s webpage: yashengshe.com
John Paul Stadler
Assistant Professor, English
Office: 212 Tompkins; 919-513-8057
Dr. Stadler teaches in the Film Studies Program and in the PhD program in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media. His research and teaching centers on the role of film and media in shaping modern notions of difference, particularly with regard to gender and sexual identities. His current project Pornographesis: Sex, Media and Gay Culture explores how adult media have influenced queer social, cultural, and political life through a series of shifting–and often conflicted–attachments. Not only are adult media among the first to depict queer longing without resorting to mere connotation, but also, their adoption of new technologies provides a potent lens for understanding our current media landscape and imagining its future.
Dr. Stadler holds a PhD in the Program in Literature from Duke University and a MFA in fiction writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder. His scholarship has appeared in Synoptique, Deep Mediations, Porn Studies, Feminist Media Histories, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Polygraph, Art + Documentation, and Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. In addition, his fiction chapbook Prehistoric was published by The Cupboard Pamphlet. He serves as the faculty advisor to Wolfpack Pictures, the film collective and screening series run by MA Film Studies students.
Send e-mail to Dr. John Stadler
Dr. Stadler’s webpage: johnpaulstadler.com
Anu Thapa
Assistant Professor, English
Office: 248 Tompkins; 919-513-6593
Dr. Thapa teaches in Film Studies and in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD program. Her research and teaching areas include film and media history and theory, South Asian cinemas, digital humanities, as well as postcolonial and decolonial theory. Her current book project explores special effects as the locus where religion and technology intersect in cinema.
Dr. Thapa has a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Iowa. Her works have been published in NECSUS, CrossCurrents, and Cinéma&Cie, and other edited collections and journals.
Affiliated Faculty
Natalie Bullock Brown
Teaching Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies
Office: 1911 Building 107B
Natalie Bullock Brown is a teaching assistant professor at North Carolina State University, and a documentary filmmaker. She is currently working on her first feature length documentary film as a director, which explores the white beauty standard and its impact on Black women and girls. She is also a producer for award-winning filmmaker Byron Hurt’s PBS documentary HAZING, which was released in September 2022. Natalie is a contributor and guest for the monthly program #BackChannel, for which she provides pop culture on WUNC radio’s The State of Things. She also serves as strategist for the organization Working Film’s StoryShift initiative, which develops praxis and best practices for ethical, accountable documentary storytelling.
Send email to Natalie Bullock Brown
Patrick FitzGerald
Associate Professor, Art & Design
Office: 276 Tompkins; (919) 515-4129
Professor FitzGerald’s multimedia work has been exhibited across the United States and Japan. As director of the IntelliMedia Initiative for the College of Design at NCSU, FitzGerald’s research and teaching span the full range of multimedia production, from digital video to interactive 3D animation. Professor FitzGerald has received national and international awards for his digital illustrations. He teaches Digital Imaging (ADN 219) and an Animation Seminar (ADN 289).
Send email to Professor FitzGerald
Nathaniel Isaacson
Assistant Professor,
World Languages and Cultures
Office: Withers 208
Nathaniel Isaacson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, where he teaches courses in Chinese language, Chinese cultural studies, literature and cinema. His research interests include Chinese science fiction, intellectual history, and visual culture. Nathaniel’s current research focuses on science fiction cinema and cultural production in the post-Mao era. His forthcoming article, “Media and Messages: Blurred Visions of Nation and Science in ‘Death Ray on a Coral Island,'” which examines the many media incarnations of Tong Enzheng’s post-socialist Sci-Fi thriller, will appear in Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema.
Send e-mail to Professor Isaacson
Mina Kaneko
Assistant Professor
World Languages and Cultures
Office: Withers 402
Mina Kaneko is an Assistant Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at North Carolina State University where she teaches courses in Japanese language, literature, and media. Her research interests include ecocriticism, film and comics, and translation studies. Funded by a Fulbright fellowship, her current research project examines mushrooms and mushroom clouds in postwar Japanese visual culture, from images of the atomic bomb to slime molds. Formerly, she was Covers Associate of The New Yorker magazine and Editorial Associate and Foreign Rights Manager at TOON Books.
Jorge Marí
Associate Professor,
World Languages and Cultures
Office: Withers 217
Jorge (Jordi) Marí is professor of contemporary Iberian socio-environmental cultural studies, film, and literature at North Carolina State University. His books include Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television (Routledge, 2017), Ventanas sobre el Atlántico: España-EE.UU. durante el postfranquismo (Universitat de Valencia, 2011), and Lecturas espectaculares: el cine en la novela española desde 1970 (Libertarias, 2003). He has taught and lectured widely in the US, Canada, France, and Spain, and has authored numerous book chapters and articles on socio-environmental cultural studies, film, literature, historical memory, music, and other topics in journals such as MLN, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Letras Peninsulares, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Arbor, España Contemporánea, Studi Ispanici, and many others. He has also published numerous journalistic essays in media outlets such as CTXT, Veggie’s World, and eurogaceta.es. Dr. Marí has won the University Outstanding Teacher Award, the Alumni Association Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Poole Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2019 was inducted into the Academy of Outstanding Teachers at NC State University. He is currently working on a monograph on eco-pedagogical approaches to Iberian film studies.
Visit Jordi’s academic site & access a few of his publications in academia.edu.
Ariel Seay-Howard
Assistant Professor,
Communication, Race, Rhetoric
Dr. Ariel Seay-Howard is a rhetoric scholar in the Communication Department who studies how the public remembers slavery and racial violence through memory spaces and material objects. Seay-Howard’s research agenda is motivated by the desire to understand how racial violence has and continues to impact the African American community. She investigates the nation’s remembrance of racial violence and examines how new modes of commemoration, like lynching memorials, former slave plantations, now museums, and documentary films operate as counter-memories that help the public remember racial violence differently than the sanitized white narrative typically remembered. Her research dives into various schools of thought within film theory, analysis and criticism, cultural and social context, and research methods such as textual analysis, audience studies, African American studies, and rhetoric. Overall, Dr. Seay-Howard’s research explores how films reflect, respond to, and remember cultural, social, and racial issues in America.
Send an email to Dr. Seay-Howard
Rico Self
Assistant Professor, Communication
Office: Winston 206
Rico Self (Ph.D., Louisiana State University and A&M College) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at North Carolina State University. Self’s interdisciplinary research explores the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and other modes of difference in U.S. popular culture, including film, television, literature, and other avenues of discourse and performance. Their published work can be found in leading journals and edited volumes.
Runlei Zhai
Assistant Teaching Professor,
World Languages and Cultures
Office: Withers 226
Runlei Zhai is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of World Languages and Cultures. She teaches courses in Chinese language, Chinese cultural studies, and Chinese cinema. Her research interests include Chinese Film Studies, Eco-Cinema, and Environmental Humanities in Asia. She has published articles and books in both English and Chinese. Her current project focuses on the slow violence of environmental deterioration and displacement in Chinese cinema.