Category Archives: film

Artificial People in the Twilight Zone

I will be presenting a paper titled “Artificial People in The Twilight Zone“ at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Spring 2016. The image above is from one of my favorite episodes, “The Lonely,” aired on November 13, 1959 on CBS. Written by Rod Serling, this episode features Corry, a man sentenced to […]

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io9: we come from the future!

I was online answering questions about robots on io9, and if you don’t know this website you really should check it out, it has such an irreverent and also knowledgeable approach to science fiction media and culture. Here is the link to the discussion, which took place on August 15, 2014, from 11 -12 Pacific […]

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On the recent debate on Young Adult Literature

Perhaps it is the impending film release of The Fault in Our Stars that has occasioned new interest in how the category known as “young adult literature” operates today in the publishing world, the book-to-film world, and the general reading world. The debate has taken many forms this summer, and has intensified after the publication […]

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My book is here! Anatomy of a Robot!

My new book, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema and the Cultural Work or Artificial People has just come out from Rutgers University Press. It is so exciting to see this project come to fruition and the book looks beautiful. Here is some more information about this project. Description Why do we find artificial people […]

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“Robots and Slaves” Talk at UC Santa Cruz

I gave a talk recently at the Center for Cultural Studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz. It was a great honor to be invited to present my work, and the discussion after the talk was lively and inspiring, with faculty and students from the departments of Literature, History of Consciousness, Film & […]

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The Lodger (1927): Alfred Hitchcock’s first feature film

Although he had directed films before The Lodger, Alfred Hitchcock described this as his true directorial debut. Indeed, watching the film today is complicated by just how much one knows about the director and his personal styles. Many of his signature moves seem to be present here, preternaturally present, elements of an authorial signature that […]

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Rethinking the Shower Scene

The online magazine PopMatters hosted a celebration of the work of Alfred Hitchcock in June 2010, partly to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Psycho. I was invited to contribute a featured  article on Psycho, and also wrote new evaluations and reviews of some of Hitchcock’s most memorable films. My article is titled ‘Get Out of […]

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