Current research
What Price Hollywood?: GENDER And Sex In THE FILMS OF GEORGE CUKOR
George Cukor with Grant and
Hepburn, on the set of Holiday (1938)
University Press of Kentucky, Spring 2020.
George Cukor is perhaps best known as a “woman’s director.” This homophobic slur also functioned as a backhanded compliment for his ability to direct successful women-centered films featuring “difficult” (strong, independent) female stars. While we, like Cukor himself, are right to eschew such a limiting label, close studies of Cukor-directed films (more than 50 across 50 years) show sustained attention to gender and sexuality in often surprising ways, inflected by ethnicity, class, and nationality. Utilizing diverse methodologies and an intersectional feminist approach, chapters explore clusters of films in case study fashion. Topics range women's friendships and the male alcoholic to queering the musical and ethnic assimilation in the 1950s.
Gina Logue interview on gender and Cukor in 2012 for MTSU News.
Mike Browning's video based on interview excerpts:
George Cukor is perhaps best known as a “woman’s director.” This homophobic slur also functioned as a backhanded compliment for his ability to direct successful women-centered films featuring “difficult” (strong, independent) female stars. While we, like Cukor himself, are right to eschew such a limiting label, close studies of Cukor-directed films (more than 50 across 50 years) show sustained attention to gender and sexuality in often surprising ways, inflected by ethnicity, class, and nationality. Utilizing diverse methodologies and an intersectional feminist approach, chapters explore clusters of films in case study fashion. Topics range women's friendships and the male alcoholic to queering the musical and ethnic assimilation in the 1950s.
Gina Logue interview on gender and Cukor in 2012 for MTSU News.
Mike Browning's video based on interview excerpts:
Racial DARKNESS IN ACE IN THE HOLE
Box office failure Ace in the Hole (1951) has received little scholarly attention beyond its prescient critique of tabloid journalism. This article manuscript contributes to expanding discussion through attention to issues of race in film content, style, and production/historical context. Sections discuss Native American representation, noir anxiety related to racial boundaries, and manifestations of the Holocaust survivor guilt that affected the film's Jewish émigré director-writer-producer Billy Wilder.
Article manuscript currently in review with a peer-reviewed academic journal.
Liminal NOIR
Co-edited with English colleague and film scholar Christopher Weedman, this edited scholarly collection will feature chapters that explore the ongoing usefulness of the "film noir" label through attention to less heralded films that straddle genres or are difficult to categorize. Our goal is not to expand the noir canon but to recover lost nuances and give new life to specific classical era (1930s-early1960s) films by exploring them through a noir lens. CFP for Liminal Noir.
