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Indiana University Bloomington

Faculty | Jason Sperb

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Communication and Culture

Email: jsperb@indiana.edu
Phone :856-4928
Office: 258

Curriculum Vitae

Education

Research Interests

US Postmodern Culture, Industry Studies, Film and Nostalgia, Audience Reception, Digital Cinema, Race in the Media, Disney History, Leisure Culture, Film Authorship

Background

My research interests focus on the ambivalent history of postmodern American media culture, with particular attention to the role that affect, nostalgia and whiteness play in shaping historical consciousness. I’m currently completing a project which explores the aesthetic and industrial role of nostalgia in the age of digital cinema. I also recently began work on another major project which will chart the historical representations and reception of leisure, nostalgia and racial utopia in 20th Century images of Hawai’i in mainland US media.

Publication Highlights

Blossoms & Blood: Postmodern Media Culture and the Films of Paul Thomas Anderson (University of Texas Press, 2013)

“I’ll (Always) Be Back: Virtual Performance and Post-Human Labor in the Age of Digital Cinema” in Culture, Theory & Critique 54.3 (Sept. 2012)

Disney’s Most Notorious Film: Race, Convergence and the Hidden Histories of Song of the South (University of Texas Press, 2012)

Co-Editor, Cinephilia in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Volume 2 (Wallflower Press, 2012)