Arts & SciencePeople Directory
Alex Jansen is a creative entrepreneur with more than 20 years’ experience in the film & media industry and a passion for community development.
Jansen has spent more than a decade running his own successful multimedia production company, Pop Sandbox. He has produced award-winning films, video games, graphic novels and interactive experiences, featured at the Cannes Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Hot Docs, the Tokyo Game Show, Indiecade and PAX East among others. Visit: www.popsandbox.com
As a media scholar working at the intersections of race, queer, and feminist studies, my research focuses on how media performances define and defy conceptions of Asian/Asian diasporic bodies. Drawing on transnational cultural histories, I theorize resistance, complicity, and ambivalence in new border crossings facilitated by digital media. I am interested in the performance of media technologies. As such, my scholarship traverses the areas of digital media, popular culture, and media installation. My research seeks to establish a multidirectional relationship between medium and content. That is, I am interested how tangible technological objects and their processes, embodied practices around media technologies, and the content communicated through media work together. In the digital age, the ideas of media as immaterial, virtual, and transcendent dominate. My work pushes against this impulse by grounding the body, the material, and the haptic.
Areas of research and supervisory interest include: Visual and popular cultures; genre cinemas; horror films & monster movies; death studies; feminist-queer-trans histories of Classical Hollywood; fan-based reading practices; superhero comic books; histories of Eugenic medicine and criminality in the West; curricular design and pedagogical strategies.
My Research-Creation work centres on making visible and legible obfuscated urban histories. In the interactive documentary Jerusalem, We Are Here we digitally reinscribed the Palestinians who were expelled during the 1948 war onto their neighborhoods and homes. In The Belle Park Project we look at environmental and colonial violence, but also re-naturalization, abundance and resilience in a Kingston city park that used to be a landfill. In the past ten years I have primarily worked within participatory and collaborative frameworks (in both my artistic practice and my academic writing). My focus is on interactive and augmented documentary, alongside cultural and other interventions in situ (guided walks, art installations, etc.).
I am interested in supervising students who work on expansive manifestations of documentary cinema, post and decolonial media practices, anti-extraction culture, feminist methods, and ethics in media. I am also happy to supervise students who work on Middle Eastern cinemas and medias, and students focussed on settler accountability on Turtle Island.
Emily Pelstring is full-time faculty in the Department of Film and Media, where her teaching areas include video, performance, sound, animation, experimental media, and music video studies. Her courses are built around creative exploration and collaboration, and she aims to facilitate a laboratory or workshop environment for students.
In 2020, I published A Companion to Federico Fellini (co-edited, Wiley Blackwell, 2022) and Fellini’s Films and Commercials: From Postwar to Postmodern (single-authored, Intellect/University of Chicago Press). I also provided a Criterion Collection audio commentary for Fellini’s Il Bidone and a keynote address for an international Fellini conference at the University of Toronto. In 2021, I recorded a 60-minute “Masterclass” on Fellini for the Cineteca di Rimini and Italian Foreign Affairs and delivered a keynote address on Fellini and James Hillman at a virtual conference originating from Rimini. I just finished co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media devoted principally to noted screenwrither Tonino Guerra and translated an Italian film script for a feature-length Hollywood movie slated to go into production this fall (2022). My interests span not just Fellini and Italian cinema but film and postmodernity, ideological criticism, cultural studies, poststructuralist theory, and gender.
https://www.queensu.ca/filmandmedia/frank-burke
My work explores the activity of both new and old media systems, and particularly the instances in which its messiness becomes more evident: the fringe genres, precarious objects, and pirate practices. I often resort to forms of Research-Creation through independent curatorial endeavors that engage with experimental and vernacular moving images. My previous projects mobilize subjects such as media façades, hyper-ephemeral video, 3D printing and scanning, videogame emulation, VR, and generative coding. As an author, I have published on the subjects of image, space, and technology. My most recent books are the monograph "Movie Circuits: Curatorial Approaches to Cinema Technology" (Amsterdam University, 2019) and the edited collection “Practices of Projection: Histories and Technologies” (Oxford University, 2020). I am also the co-coordinator of the Besides the Screen research network and festival. Currently, I am working on an exhibition project about virtual museums and on a monograph about digital replicas and cultural heritage.
Gary Kibbins is the Associate Head for Queen's Film and Media. Gary is a media artist and writer, currently teaching at Queen’s University. Until 2000 he taught at the California Institute of the Arts. A book of essays and scripts was published in 2005: Grammar & Not-Grammar: Selected Scripts and Essays by Gary Kibbins, ed. A. J. Paterson, YYZ Books, Toronto; 2005; 254 pp.
I have an ongoing interest in Canadian film, both in terms of industry and culture. Some of my recent research considers the place of auteurs, co-productions, and festivals in Canadian film culture. Recent work includes “Toronto on Screen,” a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Canadian Cinema (Marchessault and Straw eds., 2018), and a forthcoming chapter on Xavier Dolan. Another strand of my research pertains to the emergence of event cinema and the intersections of film and performance in ‘live cinema.’ My research on event cinema is forthcoming in Sounds of Fury: Mapping the Rockumentary (Iverson and MacKenzie eds., 2020). I am also currently co-editing a volume on film, performance and intermediality, forthcoming in 2021. Finally, I have a longstanding interest in geographical approaches to film and media, especially concerning cinema and urbanism. My current book project brings together geography and film theory in order to investigate how contemporary filmmakers and artists have responded to the forces of globalization and localization. I am especially interested in supervising projects on aspects of Canadian film and television; theories and histories of intermediality, liveness, and performance; national cinemas; and projects about film and media geographies.
https://www.queensu.ca/filmandmedia/faculty-and-staff/faculty-and-staff-bios/ian-robinson
I am working on cultures of urban mobility and community, particularly those that resist petrocultures and further equity. My collaborative documentary Rodando en La Habana: bicycle stories is part of this research. Currently preparing a monograph about several global cities, I am particularly interested in how motion shapes how we continuously become in the world. My larger published works are Sun, Sex, and Socialism: Cuba in the German Imaginary and the co-edited anthologies Cultural Topographies of the New Berlin and Christa Wolf A Companion. I also developed and run an etandem platform for language learning www.LinguaeLive.ca. I did my PhD in Comparative Literature at Berkeley and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford. At Berkeley, the Weimar film specialist Anton Kaes and Frankfurt School and Habermas expert Robert Holub were my advisors. I typically approach narrative fiction and documentary by triangulating historicization/contextualization, theory, and attention to the language of the artistic text; I would be particularly amenable to working with students who find this approach productive.
http://www.queensu.ca/llcu/german/people/jennifer-hosek
Jenn E Norton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, specializing in 3D animation, augmented reality, and video installation.
I am an Associate Professor in the Film and Media department of Queen’s University and co-director (with F. Grandena, U of Ottawa) of the inter-university research group EPIC (Esthétique et politique de l’image cinématographique). My research interests are centered around Indigenous film and poetry, Quebec cinema, road movies, transnational cinemas and oral practices of cinema. I am presently the lead researcher for one of the Archive Counter Archive research project (financed by SSHRC) on Arnait Video Productions collective of Inuit women. My latest publications include book chapters on the rock group U2 (Mackenzie and Iversen, 2021) and on the exploration of Indigenous lands (Cahill and Caminati, 2020) as well as an article on Indigenous women and testimonies (Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2020) an article on Québécois cinema and Americanité (American Review of Canadian Studies, 2019) and a book chapter on Canadian and Québécois Indigenous cinemas (Oxford Handbook to Canadian Cinema, 2019). In terms of supervision, I am interested in film history, film criticism, Indigenous, Québécois and transnational cinemas, cinema and landscapes, as well as documentary filmmaking and road movies from around the world (especially women on the road).
Music, violence and trauma; music and nationhood; music and gender. Recent publications examine music and cultural trauma (Singing Death: Reflections on Music and Mortality, 2017), American popular music in the aftermath of 9/11 (Music and War in the United States, 2019), and Canadian combatants, music, and the remembrance of war (MUSICultures, (2019).
Film and Media / Dan School of Drama and Music
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
Current research interests include continuing work on electronic music composer David Tudor, which began in the early 1990s, and a project more recently begun in collaboration with Dr Laura J Cameron investigating the life and practice of early Canadian field recordist William WH Gunn. In both cases the research is expressed through both published papers and works of research-creation. I am also continually developing other streams of research: an alphabet of 26 electroacoustic compositions revisiting 26 other composers' sonorities is in progress, and I regularly create sound design/scores for theatre and film. Another of my pursuits is audio recording and production in diverse genres, and some albums made with Kingston musicians have received wide recognition including Polaris Prize and JUNO nominations.
Dr. Mél Hogan is the host of The Data Fix podcast (thedatafix.net) and Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML) (environmentalmedialab.com). As of 2024, she is an Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen's University. Her research focuses on data infrastructure, extractive AI, and genomic media, each understood from within the contexts of planetary catastrophe and collective anxieties about the future. For more: http://melhogan.com.
In his research, Philippe explores complex narratives in popular media franchises; revisits transmedia storytelling and social media through concepts such as interface, playfulness and immersion; and thinks a lot about animation, seriality and popular culture.
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. At Queen’s, I have taught courses on Classical Hollywood cinemas; Arctic transnational cinemas; transnational European cinemas; film manifestos; film and media theory; Culture and Technology; and popular music and cultural studies, among others.
Film and Media / Dan School of Drama and Music
Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts
Sojung Bahng is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and researcher. She is an Assistant Professor in Media and Performance Production in the Department of Film and Media and the DAN School of Drama and Music at Queen’s University in Canada. Her main research interest lies in practice-based research and research-creation in the context of cinematic and digital media storytelling. Sojung has been exploring the creation of new artistic and narrative experiences by combining various digital technologies in cultural and philosophical contexts. Her research is multidisciplinary and collaborative; it combines various disciplines, including film & media studies, visual art, philosophy and human-computer interaction (HCI). Sojung holds a PhD from SensiLab in the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University in Australia, and her doctoral thesis Cinematic VR as a reflexive tool beyond empathy was awarded the 2020 Mollie Holman award for the best thesis of the year. She graduated from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) with a master’s degree in Culture Technology and holds a BFA from Korea National University of Arts (K-Arts), majoring in TV & Film Production and Art Theory.
Research Interest: Digital Storytelling, Cinematic Virtual Reality, New Media Narrative & Aesthetics, Multidisciplinary Art, Practice-based Research, Research-Creation
Cinema and media arts areas include gendered spaces and the city, women’s and Canadian cinemas, and Cuban cinema and visual culture; decolonial practice; media archives and their remediation, social ecology of vulnerable media, collectives and collections; curatorial projects; media arts artists’ groups and artist-run centres.
Her research interests center on the politics of visuality (including cinema, television, video, and other new media/art forms), critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. She examines media’s textual, material, and socio-political dynamics mainly through China's situated experience but gradually expands to explore the trans-regional linkages across Asia. Her current book project, Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China’s Borderlands, examines how China’s geopolitical aspirations have been hyper-mediated and entangled with the logic of frontier-making between the mid-twentieth century and the present. This book offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes that recalibrate natural environments and their political promises through geological extraction, televisual mediation of hydropower, and maritime signal sovereignty. Her book project was also supported by the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowships in China Studies (2024-2025) from the American Council of Learned Societies.