Profile

I am a film historian with a background in filmmaking, specifically in the camera department on TV commercials and music videos (back when you were more likely to find them on MTV than YouTube). I'm a historian because I like old stuff, and digging around both online and in archives, to find out things about the past. Most of my research focuses on the intersection of what academics call "Industry Studies" and "Exhibition Studies," which is just a fancy way of saying that I am interested in the people that made or showed films and the various types of communities that ended up watching them.  You can see this most clearly in the online platform the Oregon Theater Project, a collaborative site for original research related to the history of Oregon movie theaters and moviegoing around our state and over time.  The majority of the histories are produced by undergraduate students in CINE 335, a course I teach with Librarian Elizabeth Peterson.