Who Am I: The Assistant Professor

With my doctorate in English from Binghamton University in hand, I began my new position as Assistant Professor of English/Film Studies at Winona State University in August 2021. I specialize in transnational cinema, neoliberalism, feminism, and decolonial methodologies. I also teach production classes in my department and spend some of my personal time working as an instructor for children, teen, and adult film production workshops in my local community.

In my current work-in-progress, “Locating Popular Cinema: The Geopolitics of Transnational Film Practices,” I write about the filmmaking practices behind popular transnational films, produced from the 1950s to the present day, in neocolonial and neoliberal political contexts. I work in a subfield known as “industry studies,” which moves beyond the textual analysis of films to consider their sites of production, distribution, and reception. My book expands conversations in transnational film and industry studies by blurring local, national, and global borders through decolonial analyses of films from the Americas, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. More specifically, I show how inequalities in film and scholarly labor structure transnational films.

I am a former Public Humanities Fellow from the 2017-2018 AY. My project, "Cinema, Coffee and Conversations," sought to strengthen the relationships between Binghamton University and the greater Binghamton community through a film screening series. Cinema, Coffee, and Conversations was conceived as a space to center communal viewership and discussion as as site for the emergence of empathy and deeper community ties. The Public Humanities Fellowship is awarded through Humanities NY, and funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

I finished my MA in the spring 2016 in the English department at Michigan State University. My masters thesis presented a symptomatic reading of neoliberalism's effects in Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful and engaged Save the Last Dance through an intersectional framework that resisted the binaries attached to race, gender, and class.

  Who am i: The joy-seeker

An avid reader, lover of dogs, cats, and all things fluffy. I  I am originally from West Bloomfield, MI. After completing my BA at Michigan State University in 2011, I worked in the film industry for three years, both in Michigan and in Los Angeles.


I've worked in development as an intern at Morgan Freeman's production company, Revelations Entertainment and as an assistant to Director Jordan Alan; in production as an assistant to Producer Marvin Towns Jr. on the indie horror film, The Wicked; in entertainment law as a legal assistant; and in post-production as a Production Coordinator on the Behind-the-Scenes (BTS), second-screen experience, marketing, and EPK material for Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey at Trailer Park (entertainment and marketing agency).


In 2013 I came to the realization that my true passion was the critical engagement with film that an academic career could provide, and I moved back to Michigan to apply for graduate school. I immediately fell in love with teaching and found a lot of fulfillment as a TA and as a stand-alone instructor in face-to-face, hybrid, and online classrooms during my graduate career. I love the opportunity teaching affords me to foster a collaborative learning community where students see themselves not only as consumers of knowledge, but also as generators of knowledge.

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On a personal note, my interests include sitting in front of the TV and watching mindless, embarrassingly cringe-worthy reality television, digital photography and editing, knitting and crocheting, snuggling with my two dogs, my cat, and my husband, hiking, camping, any kind of word or mind game, tending to my plant babies, and finding time to connect with the world spiritually through the practice of tarot. I am a huge proponent of nourishing body, mind, and soul through all of the above avenues.