At present, my research largely attends to how film and media depict history, as well as how these depictions both draw on and impact the viewer’s perceived relationship to the historical world.
To investigate these questions, I draw on diverse methodologies including formal/stylistic analysis, archival research, and phenomenology.
My dissertation project, “Televising Public History,” incorporates these questions and methodologies into the realm of historical documentary for American public television. A close, comparative analysis of filmmakers Henry Hampton and Ken Burns (best known for Eyes on the Prize (1987) and The Civil War (1990), respectively), this project will investigate the role of ‘the public’ as both a discourse and a lived experience, one shaped and shaped by public media. It aims to make interventions in the study of public media ecology, documentary authorship, and race in nonfiction cinema.