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Graduate Students in Screen Studies work closely with faculty on a wide range of research projects at both the M.A. and Ph.D. level. Though graduate students from all programs may participate in Screen Studies seminars, the following students have identified Screen Studies as their major research area.

Shane Gilley  Ph.D. Student
     Areas of Interest
          •   Hip Hop culture, music videos, documentary film, Italian Giallo
          •   Directors Spike Lee, Spike Jonze, Dario Argento, P.T. Anderson
          •   Theorists Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Mikhail Bakhtin
     Publications
          •   Entry on Tupac Shakur. Greenwood Press Encyclopedia of African
               American Literature, September 2005
     Works in Progress
          •  "A Look at Film Rhetoric: Native Land and Mikhail Bakhtin," theorizing the
               pro-union, Socialist documentary Native Land vis-à-vis the  Bakhtinian
               ideas of heteroglossia and participation in dialogic
     Conference Presentations
          •  "Politics is Perception:' Motivations Behind Presidential Films." Film and
               History League Conference, February 2005
          •  "Eating the Irish: Cannibalism in Ulysses." National James Joyce
               Conference, June 2003


James Knecht  Ph.D. Student
     Areas of Interest
          •   representations of masculinity in film and television
          •   recent teen film and television
          •   contemporary horror films
          •   Star Wars films and literature
          •   criticial theory, especially the works of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida,
               Roland Barthes, and Susan Jeffords
     Works in Progress
          •   Editor of the two issues on War (35.1 and 36.1) of Film & History,
               An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies (Spring and
               Fall 2006)
          •   an article on current representations of teenage masculinity on television
          •   an article examining the interrelations of masculinity, history, and the
               Gulf War in the film Three Kings (1999)
     Conference Presentations
          •  "Scream Knows What It’s Talking About: Referentiality as the New
              'New Masculinity.'" National Popular Culture Association/American Culture
               Association Conference, March 2005
          •  "Editors Panel – Special Event: 'What Do Editors Really Want? Or, How to
               Copy That.'" Panelist as Associate Editor, Film & History Southwest/TX               Popular and American Culture Associations Conference, February 2005
          •  "Scare Tactics: Generating Fear in Jeepers Creepers." National Popular
               Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference, April 2004


Scott Krzych  Ph.D. Student
     Areas of Interest
          •   representations of the working class in film
          •   theorists Barbara Johnson, Stanley Fish, and Stuart Hall
          •   directors King Vidor, John Ford, and Brian De Palma
     Articles in Progress
          •  "Queer Celibacy: The Normalization of Lesbian Desire in Film and
              Television,” traces the application of Queer Theory to popular
              representations of lesbian lifestyle, and argues for a rethinking of such
              images along Lacanian and Marxist paradigms
          •  "Secular Salvation: The Shared Myths of Liberalism and Contemporary
              Christianity,” offers a post-structuralist theory of the relation between
              the discourses of fundamentalism and liberalism as manifest in
              Evangelical media (Trinity Broadcasting Network, the film Left Behind)
              and in secular representations/critiques of Christianity (Saved!)
     Conference Presentations
          •  "Straight Girl, Gay Girl. . .An Orgasm is an Orgasm: Undoing Gender in
              Kissing Jesica Stein." Popular Culture Association (South), October 2005
          •  "Ironic Resistance: Negative Space in Tess Slesinger’s 'Jobs in the Sky.'"
              American Literature Association Conference, May 2005


Brad Lewis  M.A. Student
     Areas of Interest
          •   film noir
          •   punk culture
          •   classic horror cinema
          •   exploitation cinema
          •   American independent cinema
          •   directors Guy Maddin, Jack Hill, Anthony Mann, Wong Kar-Wai


Jacqueline Megow  Ph.D. Student
     Areas of Interest
          •   female subjectivity and romantic comedy
          •   Doris Day as mid-century cultural icon
          •   1950s television
          •   post-World War II movie musicals
          •   theorists Mary Ann Doane, Kathleen Rowe, Lynn Spigel, Jane Feuer
          •   directors Nora Ephron, Norman Jewison, Michael Curtiz, Vincente Minnelli
     Articles in Progress
          •  "Domestic Friction: 1950s Sitcom Housewives and Their Husbands"
          •  "Instances of Resistance and Ideological Incoherence: The Doris Day
               Show's Update of the Mid-Century Family Sitcom"
          •  "Searching for Something More: Female Subjectivity and the 1990s
               Romantic Comedy Heroine
     Conference Presentations
          •  "Remembering the Affair: Sleepless in Seattle as Exploration of Lacanian
               Desire." Popular Culture Association Conference, April 2006
          •  “Biographical Treatments of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Central Washington
               University Joint Graduate Student and Faculty Conference, May 2002


Debbie Olson  Ph.D. Student
     Areas of Interest
          •   African-American cinema
          •   folklore and childrens films
          •   film noir and the psychological thriller
          •   African cinema
          •   directors Djibril Diop Mambety and Tim Burton
          •   theorists Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon and Homi Bhabha
     Publications
          •   Twelve entries. Writing African American Women. Greenwood, 2006
          •   Four entries. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American
               Literature, 2006
          •   Nine entries. Encyclopedia of Prostitution and Sex Work. Greenwood,
               2006
     Articles in Progress
          •  "The Signifying Soldier: Black Aesthetics in Carlton Moss' The Negro
               Soldier (1944)"
          •  "Burton's Blue: The Product(ion) of Color in Tim Burton's Nightmare Before
               Christmas and The Corpse Bride"
          •  "Lu Jot Bot Bi? Ousmane Sembene and Djibril Diop Mambety: African
               Cinema Rhetoric and the Search for Authenticity"
     Conference Presentations
          •   The Commodification of Ms. Penny Proud: Consumer Culture in Fat Albert
               and the Cosby Kids (CBS 1972-1984) and Disney's The Proud Family
               (2001-2003); Oklahoma Film & Video Studies Society Conference,
               Tulsa, March 2006 


Kimberly Tolson  M.A. Student     
     Areas of Interest
          •   Cinematic Sound
          •   Japanese Musicals
          •   Television Studies and Cultural Studies
          •   Theorists Roland Barthes and Michel Chion
          •   Directors Joel and Ethan Coen and Takashi Miike
     Articles in Progress
          •  "The Episodical: Wake Up, It's Not a Dream" explores diegetic singing
               within non-musicals and the blissful (Barthes), yet traditional, use of
               music in generic hybrids
          •  "Simply Life or Death?: The Neo-Femme Fatale" dissects the mutated
               motives and goals of the post-1960s femme fatale and tracks her
               defiance of the traditional role of the femme fatale
     Conference Presentations
          •  "Can You Hear Me Now?: The De-Acousmatization of Intercom Voices."
               Oklahoma Film and Video Studies Society Conference at the University
               of Central Oklahoma, November 2004