My research is interested in the ways that we think about cinema and its multiple histories across a range of international sites, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa and in the former British settler colonies.

My most recent book, Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (2020),  reestablishes the importance of the Moroccan filmmaker Moumen Smihi to the history of cinema in the region. But it also uses his work to think more deeply about modernism in the Arab world and about the ways that we theorize and historicize Arab cinema in a world frame. This project was supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of California President’s Faculty Research in the Humanities Award. More information and interviews about the book can be found on its webpage here.

My first book, Making Settler  Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (2010) also investigates the complex and layered histories of cinema across colonial and postcolonial histories. In particular, it  follows the intertwined settler colonial histories of Hollywood, British, Australian, and New Zealand cinemas during the period of the 1920s-50s. I am interested particularly in how settler colonialism structured cinema not only in terms of representation (films like Hollywood westerns, which focused on settler-indigenous encounters refashioned as myths of exceptional nationhood) but also in terms of production: Britain and Hollywood vied for Australian and New Zealand screens during that period, and thus the former settler colonies found themselves under the sway of two empires. I study the ways that Britain tried to create an empire film market in that period through productions in Australia and New Zealand. But in the last part of the book I think about the ways that archivists and indigenous communities have returned to historical films to rethink their place in the present, in the process challenging some of the ways that we do film history in postcolonial environments.

Alongside and departing from these projects, I have published essays on Moroccan modernism and documentary, Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Alajafari’s work, recent Algerian documentary, and queer experimental documentary. Links to these can be found in the Essays section of this website.

My research practice over the past decade has also depended on film curation: helping preserve films that have been out of circulation and programming work for new audiences and screenings.