Faculty (Tenured Track, Tenured, Continuing)
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.
Jenn E Norton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media, specializing in 3D animation, augmented reality, and video installation.
Her research interests center on politics of visuality (including cinema, television, video, and other new media/art forms), critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. She examines these textual, material, and socio-political dynamics mainly through the situated experience of China but gradually expanding to explore the trans-regional linkages across Asia and the Global South. Her work appeared in peer-review journals such as Asiascape: Digital Asia, Culture Machine, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Journal of Environmental Media. In the past, she has led curatorial projects such as “Elemental Relations: Thinking Ecologically through Artist Film and Video” (2021) and “China Now: Independent Visions” (2016).
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).
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.
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
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.
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.