Program Director
Ara Osterweil
Ara Osterweil is the Director of the World Cinemas minor program as well as Associate Professor of English (Cultural Studies). A film historian as well as a painter, Osterweil is interested in how politics and aesthetics converge in postwar cinema; her expertise is in American cinema of the 1960s and experimental film. She has taught courses on American Cinema of the 1960s, American Avant-Garde Film, Contemporary Cinema, Revolutionary Cinema, Women Filmmakers and Authors, Postwar Italian Cinema, as well as on auteurs such as John Cassavetes, Jonas Mekas, Jean-Luc Godard, Chantal Akerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Andy Warhol, and Pedro Almodovar. She regularly teaches core courses, ENGL 359: Poetics of the Image and ENGL 279: Introduction to the History of Film, as well as 500-level and graduate seminars in the creation of experimental multimedia. Her first book, Flesh Cinema: The Corporeal Turn in American Avant-Garde Film (Manchester, 2014) meditates on the representation of the carnal body and the centrality of queer forms of friendship in experimental films of the 1960s and 1970s. Her second book, The Pedophilic Imagination: A History of American Film (forthcoming from Duke University Press), interrogates the role of the erotic child and intergenerational intimacy in American cinema, since its inception to the present. She is a regular contributor to Artforum and has published essays in Millennium Film Journal, Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Art Journal, Border Crossings, the Brooklyn Rail, Framework and other journals and edited volumes.
Faculty Members
Diana Allan
Diana Allan is a filmmaker and associate professor in the Department of Anthropology, where she co-directs the Critical Media Lab. Her publications and films explore Palestinian displacement in Lebanon. She is the author of Refugees of the Revolution: Experience of Palestinian Exile(2014), and Voices of the Nakba: A Living History of Palestine(2021). Her films include Still Life (2007), Terrace of the Sea (2010), So Dear, So Lovely (2018), and Partition (2025), premiered at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and awarded prizes for best feature film at RIDM, FIDOCS, Archivio Aperto, and Family Film Archives. She is the co-founder of the Nakba Archive and a Canada Research Chair in the Anthropology of Living Archives.
Bobby Benedicto
Bobby Benedicto works in queer theory, psychoanalysis, film and photography, death studies, and critical theory. He is jointly appointed in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at McGill University, where he leads the Sex in Theory working group. His current book project, Fatal Sex: Queer of Color Negativity and the Erotics of Death (Duke University Press), examines the entanglements of sexuality, race, and death through psychoanalysis and the writings of Georges Bataille. The book challenges reparative frameworks in queer theory and queer of color critique by foregrounding the radical alterity of erotic life. Benedicto is the author of Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), an honorable mention for the Ruth Benedict Prize in queer anthropology and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Studies. His research has been supported by SSHRC, FRQSC, the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and his writing has appeared in Postmodern Culture, differences, Society & Space, and GLQ, among others.
Eugenio Bolongaro
Eugenio Bolongaro is Associate Professor in the Department of Italian Studies. His main interests are contemporary Italian prose fiction, Italian film, and literary theory. His book, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature, was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2003. He has published several articles on Italian literature and cinema in British, American and Italian journals. His current research focuses on the Italian “young cannibals” and ethics in literary criticism, as well as on the representation of homosexual desire in Luchino Visconti’s films.
Kimberly Chung
Kimberly Chung is Korea Foundation Assistant Professor of Korean Literary and Cultural Studies at McGill University. Her book, The Sensational Proletarian: Leftist Cultures in Colonial Korea (Stanford University Press, 2025) explores how colonial leftist Korean cultural production highlighted and intensified the sensations of the body to interpret class politics, drawing from and more fully articulating a focus on affect and the body already within Marxism. She has published research on modern and contemporary Korean literature, visual culture, and art in scholarly journals like Journal of Korean Studies and Acta Koreana and was a special guest editor for the issue Sensibility and Landscape in Korean Literature and Film for Acta Koreana (Vol. 17 no.1, 2014). She is also co-editor of an anthology on Korean contemporary art titled Korean Art From 1953: Collision, Innovation and Interaction (Phaidon Press, 2020).
Mbaye Diouf
Mbaye Diouf is an associate professor in the Department of French-Language Literatures (DLLF) where he teaches Francophone literatures and cinemas. He edited Langages et imaginaires de Sembène Ousmane (2023) and Spatialités littéraires et filmiques francophones : nouvelles perspectives (2018).
Alain Farah
Alain Farah is a professor of literature at McGill University. His work focuses on the connection between contemporary literary creation and its engagement with politics. He is the author of several books, including Mille secrets mille dangers (Le Quartanier, 2021), for which he co‑wrote the screenplay of Lovely Day, the novel’s adaptation directed in 2025 by Philippe Falardeau presented in many festivals around the globe (TIFF, Busan International Film Festival, Palm springs Film Festival).
Alain Farah est professeur de littérature à l’Université McGill. Son travail porte sur le lien entre la création littéraire contemporaine et les politiques de la littérature. Il est l’auteur de plusieurs livres dont le roman Mille secrets mille dangers (Le Quartanier, 2021), dont il a cosigné le scénario de l’adaptation cinématographique réalisée en 2025 par Philippe Falardeau.
Yuriko Furuhata
Yuriko Furuhata is Professor and a former William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History (2015-2025) in the Department of East Asian Studies, and an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her first book, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013), won the Best First Book Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Her second book, Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Duke University Press, 2022), explores the geopolitical conditions underpinning environmental art, weather control, digital computing, and cybernetic architecture in Japan and the United States. Her third book, Archipelagic Archives of the Anthropocene: Visual Grammars of Deep Time (Duke University Press, 2026), examines the visualization of "deep time" and its underlying epistemic and political assumptions through geological maps, scientific photographs, films, and classifications of fossils, clouds, snow crystals, and coral reefs in relation to the territorial ambitions of Japan and the United States as archipelagic empires. . Her work has appeared in a wide range of journals, including Grey Room, Media+Environment, Representation, Screen, e-flux, and more.
Amanda Holmes
Amanda Holmes is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies. She studies urban and spatial representation in contemporary Latin American culture. Her interests in film include New Argentine Cinema, landscape and film, and transatlantic cinema. She edited the volume, “Crossing Borders and Identities in Hispanic Cinema” for the Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 37.1 (2012), and she is currently finishing a book-length manuscript on architecture in contemporary Argentine cinema.
Derek Nystrom
Derek Nystrom is an Associate Professor of English who teaches in the Cultural Studies stream. He has taught courses on: 1970s U.S. cinema; 1980s U.S. cinema; the U.S. teen film; Todd Haynes; Hollywood cinema during the Great Depression; the cinema of precarity; Marxist literary and cultural theory; film and television theory; the U.S. war film as a genre; Robert Altman; class and labour in post-WWII U.S. film and literature; and introductions to film studies and cultural studies.
His essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, Postmodern Culture, Radical History Review, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. His book, Hard Hats, Rednecks, and Macho Men: Class in 1970s American Cinema (New York: Oxford UP, 2009), was named as a finalist for the 2010 Richard Wall Memorial Award by the Theatre Library Association. He is currently working on a bunch of different stuff.
Daniel Pratt
I work on Central and Eastern European culture, specifically Czech, Polish, Russian, Hungarian, and Austrian literature and film. I am a comparativist, broadly interested in the intersection of literature, film, history, and philosophy. I have written on the meaning of history in Central Europe, dissident punk rock in Czechoslovakia, Socialist World Literature, and Czechoslovak cinematic horror, amongst other topics. I’m currently finishing my book manuscript Against Narrative: Non-Narrative Temporalities in Central Europe, while working on a second book on Bruno Jasieński, socialist world literature, and the pursuit of internationalism.
Cecily Raynor
Cecily Raynor is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Digital Humanities at McGill University. Her research traces the entanglements between media ecologies, digital culture, and environmental infrastructures in Latin America, attending to the ways individuals and communities articulate identity, language, and belonging through and in response to shifting technological and ecological regimes.
Ned Schantz
Ned Schantz is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, where he teaches courses such as Introduction to Film Studies, Horror Film, Hitchcock, and Film of the Forties. He is the author of Gossip, Letters, Phones: The Scandal of Female Networks in Film and Literature (Oxford 2008), and his essays include “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Begins.” (co-authored with J. Shea). In American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper. Eds. Kris Woofter and Will Dodson. Austin: U of Texas P, 2021, 217-228; “Surprised by La Jetée,” Senses of Cinema 76 (September 2015); and "Melodramatic Reenactment and the Ghosts of Grizzly Man," Criticism Volume 55, Number 4 (Fall 2013). He has recently finished a book on the problem of hospitality in Hitchcock.
Daniel Schwartz
Daniel Schwartz is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. His research focuses on the intersection of urban studies, Russian and German cinema, and sound studies. Currently, he is at work on a book project, City Symphonies 1913-1931: Sound, Politics, and the Avant-Garde, which explores the relationship between audial practices and the composition of political communities in the work of figures such as Arseny Avraamov, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Ruttmann, and Dziga Vertov. Through both historical and textual analysis, he seeks to question the relationship between utopias and their use of everyday sounds, spaces, and practices as aesthetic materials.
Lisa Stevenson
Lisa Stevenson is an Associate Professor, William Dawson Scholar and co-director of the Critical Media Lab in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University. In recent years, a central focus of her work has been the question of what it means to think in images. Through experimental ethnographic writing, filmmaking and theatre as modes of representation she has attempted to trace and describe such imagistic forms of thought in the everyday lives of people in situations of violence—among the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic and among Colombian refugees in Ecuador. Her book Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic (University of California Press, 2014) won the 2015 Victor Turner Book Prize and the 2020 Staley Prize. Her short film, Into Unknown Parts, created in collaboration with Eduardo Kohn, premiered at the Margaret Mead Film Festival in NYC in 2017.
Alanna Thain
I teach film and cultural studies in the department of English. My work focuses on the philosophy of movement and bodies in cinema, as well as theories of affect and the image. My publications include work on David Lynch, South African animator and artist William Kentridge, Québecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, cinematic elevators, contemporary screendance and intermedial dance performance, post-cinematic practices and biotechnological bodies in science fiction TV.
My current book projects include “Suspended Reanimations”, a study of bodies, double and affect in cinema through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and “An Experimental Night”, on dance and screen and media in live dance performance. I also work on questions of the creative intersections of art and philosophy, as an editor of Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. At McGill, I am a member of the Project on European Cinemas and the Moving image Research Laboratory.
My teaching interests include the encounter between theory and practice in small, experimental production classes, as well as courses on David Lynch, the French New Wave (then and now), Canadian Cinema, Affect and the Image, Cinematic Bodies, documentary film, Film Noir and Neo-Noir, animation, film and feminism and cinematic politics.
Ipek Tureli
Ipek Türeli is Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture. Her work lies at the intersection of visual culture, comparative urbanism, and architectural history. She has published on visualizations of the city in mass media-in photography, cinema, exhibitions, theme parks and museums-as well as the production and circulation of these media in the city.
Dr. Türeli uses cinema and documentary films as an integral part of teaching: Students engage cinema films as visual representations and cultural artefacts constitutive of the urban experience; they also get the opportunity to produce short digital films that use ethnographic methods and explore spatial stories from a user perspective—in courses such as Arch 684 Contemporary Theory I: “New Architectures of Spatial Justice,” Arch 566 Cultural Landscapes: “Miniature Worlds."