My current research in film focuses on the processes through which ableism becomes normalized and embedded within diverse visual and workplace discourses, such as horror films, television shows, and video games. My publications on Dario Argento’s films and zombie culture focus on the relationship among disability, deviance, and metaphor in horror films. For example, contemporary zombie films by George Romero and Edgar Wright dramatize critiques of traditional models that examine disability. They move beyond those approaches, such as the medical or minority models, to explore what Fiona Kumari Campbell has called “the maintenance of abledness” in modified bodies. By using the zombie figure to critique the ways that ableism becomes embedded in the cinematic language of the horror genre, these works examine the process through which elements of abledness become normalized. This framework shows how these films self-reflexively interrogate the role that metaphors of disability play in the horror genre and how ableism embeds itself not only within the content of the film but also within the form the film takes. I argue that horror films specifically represent internalized ableism through the repeated use of a medium shot to depict characters with disabilities or, in the case of zombies, characters who act as metaphors for people with disabilities. In Romero’s Day of the Dead, the objectifying gaze of the medical room medium close shot, the shot that the film most often uses in showing us the zombie Bub learning to wear headphones or to salute his mentor Dr. Logan, fosters Bub’s role as a scientific object to be explored, explained, and fixed. Interestingly, though, the camera also often depicts Dr. Logan from this same implied distance from the camera, the medium close shot. The matching shots of Bub and Dr. Logan attempt to undermine ontological uncertainty by visually having the scientist identified with the zombie. As a metaphor of disability, the zombie calls attention to the supposed objective and normative ways that camera shots depict people with disabilities, exposing the fictitious ideas of normal and average.

I convey to my students the importance of the ability to communicate across disciplinary divisions through the final project in my Horror Film class. In this assignment, groups of students from different majors make horror shorts or trailers using iPads provided by the university. They must then defend their aesthetic choices in a presentation that draws upon semester readings by Carol Clover, Barbara Creed, Martin Norden, Rick Altman, and Tom Gunning, to name a few. You can find examples of this work at tinyurl.com/psuhorror1 and tinyurl.com/psuhorror2. In Film Genre, I pair film students with graphic design students on a project in which they create an infographic outlining the history, typologies, themes, theories, and iconography of the romantic comedy, film noir, and science fiction genres, among other. Through this project, students see how their peers can act as valuable resources in the learning process, in addition to gaining valuable experience using popular computer software applications.

My focus on identities relegated to the fringe provides a catalyst for my teaching of literature. In my class on disability in British literature and film, we follow a social model of disability to study how the social constructions, symbols, and stigmas associated with disability identity and represented in British literature are related to larger systems of power that oppress and exclude. Readings range from full-length fiction with unique narrators—like a boy with autism trying to solve a neighborhood murder or a Victorian novel about a blind heroine—to medical memoirs and short stories. We consider issues like the borders between “normal” and “abnormal” or “sanity” and “madness” and what makes the concerns raised by our readings relevant to even a general reader. In my sophomore literature course “Monsters Inc.,” students often arrive with preconceived ideas about the form and purpose of horror literature and film—that these works offer only cheap thrills and that the monster always punishes the morally ambiguous female characters, for example. I challenge these notions by guiding them through works of feminist horror, such as Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves” or films from the British Hammer Horror Studios, and by giving them a context in which to read critically these movies and works of fiction by bringing in readings by Carol Clover and Barbara Creed, both scholars of gender in horror texts. This approach encourages students to look beyond their often cursory interpretations of popular literature and media. They begin to understand how they construct their own authorial identities in their writing and how they situate their prospective audiences for persuasive or informative purposes by examining questions of form and dissemination in literary narrative and visual rhetoric.

I have spoken widely on monsters and disability in literature and film through a variety of community venues, including Pittsburg Public Library, Joplin Public Library, and the Alabama Phoenix Festival. These experiences have led to my reputation as a local “zombie expert.”

Selected Film and Literature Sample Syllabi and Assignments

English 875: “Seminar:  Whose Canon is It, Anyway?”  (PDF)

This graduate-level, face-to-face seminar examines the current canon debate in a way that will give you a grasp of the history and theory of canon formation as well as hands-on practice in canon revision (tailored to your particular field specialties and interests).  Readings and viewings will fall within one of three categories:

• Primary literature, film, and criticism in the self-consciously canonical lineage that was formative of the English literary canon as we now know it.
• Primary literature, film, and criticism that was excluded from, yet conscious of, the canon (and thus in its way equally constitutive of the canon).
• Current academic criticism and theory of the canon as well as selections from the journalism of the “culture wars.”

These readings, which focus on the following topics or “problems,” are designed to suggest that the evolution of the canon cannot be understood separately from that of the major institutions of the modern nation-state (political, economic, social, educational, and communicational).  Likewise, the readings often model or perform these problems, whether explicitly or implicitly:

• The classics problem
• The national literacy problem
• The genre problem
• The generation/period problem
• The schooling problem
• The minority/marginal cultures problem
• The information age problem

English 772: “Periods in Literature:  Contemporary British Literature.”  (PDF)

How have British writers since 1979 (beginning with Margaret Thatcher’s appointment as Prime Minister) responded to the end of empire, the Cold War, economic decline, and radical changes in racial and sexual politics?  This face-to-face course offers an introduction to contemporary British literature in an era of profound political and economic change and social upheaval. We will explore novels, poetry, music, and film profoundly influenced by the shadow of war, by immigration from the former colonies, by dramatic shifts in gender relations and sexuality, by class conflict and deindustrialization, environmental catastrophe, and by the potential “break up” of Britain. Caught between an ambivalent “special relationship” with America and a technocratic European super-state, how has British culture adapted to its uneasy geopolitical position? How does a nation so obsessed with images of its past traditions remain at the cutting-edge of music and popular culture? What is Britain’s position in the global cultural economy? We will examine a range of avant-garde, postcolonial, and “popular” texts which challenge received notions of Britishness (and its relatives Englishness, Irishness, and Scottishness).  We will pay particular attention to the interaction between literature and other cultural forms such as cinema, popular music, and sport.

English 561: “British Theme:  Postmodern Victorian Literature.”  (PDF)

The theme that will focus our study of British novels, plays, and films in this face-to-face course is the way in which these forms have become a site of postmodern culture’s preoccupation with the Victorian period.  Many critics have termed this trend the “afterlife” of the nineteenth century; the numerous adaptations, references, rearticulations, and recontextualizations of nineteenth-century literature are growing exponentially every year.  A number of questions will guide our discussion:  How do these works represent history?  How do they interrogate or encapsulate the zeitgeist of a period (and what does our obsession with another period say about our own time)?  What exactly constitutes an “afterlife,” and will our own time have one?  What characteristics of Victorian novels and plays do postmodern novels, plays, and films choose to adopt and adapt or choose to ignore?  How have rapidly changing visual technologies in both periods played a role in the formation of the different texts?

Sample Assignment:  Oral Exams (PDF)

English 561: “British Theme:  Disability in British Literature and Film.”  (PDF)

This face-to-face course focuses on British literature and film by and about people with physical and mental health conditions.  Readings will range from full-length fiction with unique narrators—like a boy with autism trying to solve a neighborhood murder—to medical memoirs and short stories.  We’ll consider the texts we read from a contextual framework and discuss issues like the borders between “normal” and “abnormal” or “sanity” and “madness” and what makes the concerns raised by our readings relevant to even a general reader.  Within the humanities, considerable scholarly attention has been given to the content of, motives behind, and social effects of the ways in which disabled individuals are represented in literature, film, visual arts and other artistic forms.  The aim of this course is to provide a general introduction to disability studies as they apply to the study of British literature and film, particularly fictional and nonfictional narratives.  We will follow a social model of disability to study how the social constructions, symbols, and stigmas associated with disability identity and represented in British literature are related to larger systems of power that oppress and exclude.

Sample Assignment: Close Reading (PDF)

English 560: “British Genre:  Fiction— The Sexy British Novel.”  (PDF)

This face-to-face course examines the history of the British novel and the diverse strategies of style, structure, characterization, and narrative techniques authors have deployed since the eighteenth century.  In addition to style, form, and genre, our conversations will explore questions of gender difference and of sexual desire—paying special attention to images of women, representations of “manliness,” and treatments of heterosexual, homosexual, and “abnormal” sexual desire (from the many instances of incest in 18^th century novels to the ways in which authors have depicted technology’s influence on sexuality at the end of the 20^th century).  More fundamentally, the course will introduce students to questions about how the British novel has influenced British social and cultural history as much as this history has influenced the development of novel.

Sample Assignment:  Revision Assignment (PDF)

English 558: “Topics in Film Studies— Horror Movies.”  (PDF)

Horror films often have been considered as being among the lowest and most exploitative of cinematic genres. Despite such criticisms, the horror genre is more complex than it initially may seem to be; lurking beneath the bloody surface are unique insights and commentaries on the various contexts in which such films were produced. Critics from a variety of fields have recognized that horror films provide a complicated but popular forum in which social tensions may be interrogated. This course will serve as an introduction to major films within the genre, from the 1890s to works released in recent years. Through weekly screenings and critical readings, we will consider how the horror genre has served as a barometer of sorts for cultural anxieties at particular historic moments. Additionally, we will focus on the numerous aesthetic choices and filmmaking techniques that are evident throughout our course films in order to reveal both continuity and growth within the genre.

Sample Assignment: Horror Film/Trailer Assignment (PDF)

English 305: “Introduction to Film Studies.”  (PDF)

Introduction to the basics of film aesthetics, including mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, narrative, sound, and critical and historical approaches to film.

This face-to-face course will teach you how to analyze cinema.  We will study cinema’s fundamental stylistic elements: mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, and sound.  Students will then learn how sounds and moving images work together to structure a film or render a narrative. Students will also learn to write about cinema, and we will spend considerable class time developing writing and analytical skills.

The films we will study represent diverse styles, periods, genres, national cinemas, and production modes in order to give students an understanding of the wide range of cinema’s expressive possibilities. Throughout the course, we will concentrate on movies as movies—as experiences for spectators—and, wherever we are, we will never be far from our central question: What is it about the movies people like that makes people like them?

It will probably be obvious to you that our films are by no means comprehensive; this is the sad necessity of a sixteen-week course.  While this class is designed to introduce you to some of the major issues in film studies, it has no pretensions to fully covering its entirety.

Sample Assignment: Sequence Analysis (PDF)

English 242: “British Literature II.”  (PDF)

Representative authors and works from the Romantic to the contemporary period.

This face-to-face course introduces you to British literature from around 1798 (the year that Wordsworth and Coleridge first published Lyrical Ballads) to the present.  While we will focus our attention on significant examples of the literature from this period and will consider the structural and stylistic devices of each text, we will do so in the larger context of a discussion of the writers’ thematic concerns as well as the specific historical events and cultural influences to which these writers responded.  We will be particularly interested in considering literary connections across time and in examining the formation of the British literary tradition.

Our excursions into these periods will necessarily be brief.  It will probably be obvious to you that our readings are by no means representative (not to mention comprehensive); this is the sad necessity of the survey course.  While this class is designed to introduce you to some of the major issues and periods of British literature, it has no pretensions to fully covering the last 217 years.  Rather, its aim is to acquaint you with the major movements and some of the important writers of these periods.

This course will be primarily discussion-oriented.  In an effort to focus the course and to provide some continuity across the time periods, our discussions will concentrate on four intertwined ideas:

1. The Role of the Artist and Art / the Author and Literature
2. Britishness / National Identity
3. Men and Women, Femininity and Masculinity, Gender and Sex
4. Class Differences

We most certainly can stray from the intended path.  I find that those moments when we venture into unknown territory are the most valuable for you as students and the most exciting for me as a teacher.

Sample Assignment: British Literature Paragraphs, or BLiPs (PDF)

English 116: “General Literature:  Theme— Monsters Inc.”  (PDF)

This face-to-face course introduces students to the study of texts in the English language and is intended to give English majors the skills necessary to succeed in more advanced courses and those students in other disciplines an additional critical consciousness crucial to any major.  These skills include familiarity with important terms and concepts; close reading skills; awareness of the sorts of questions raised by texts and addressed by scholars; and practice writing analysis papers that defend an arguable thesis based on a close reading of texts, whether novel, poem, play, or film.

To help us achieve these goals, we will focus our attention on incarnations of the “Monstrous Other” in terms of race/ethnicity, religion, sex/gender, politics, and class.  In other words, we will explore how different kinds of monsters in literature and film, such as the vampire, the witch, the werewolf, and (my favorite) the zombie, become metaphors for (usually marginalized) groups of people that mainstream society “fears” (or just does not like).  Some questions we might consider include:  Why do different cultures “create” the monsters that they do?  How do monsters and what they represent change over time and in different genres?  How does literature and film both support and dispel stereotypes of different groups through monsters?  Can monsters ever be good?  Of course, these are only a few examples of possible questions we can ask about the texts we will encounter in the course.

English 114: “General Literature:  Genre— Film Genre.”  (PDF)

This face-to-face course introduces students to the study of texts in the English language and is intended to give English majors the skills necessary to succeed in more advanced courses and those students in other disciplines an additional critical consciousness crucial to any major.  These skills include familiarity with important terms and concepts; close viewing skills; awareness of the sorts of questions raised by texts and addressed by scholars; and practice writing analysis papers that defend an arguable thesis based on a close viewing of films.

To help us achieve these goals, we will focus our attention on a survey of film genre.  What is genre?  Are film genres a marketing tool, a by-product of journalism, or a fundamental way of understanding and discussing motion pictures?  What are the generic tropes (in terms of both narrative and film technique) associated with certain genres?  Can a film belong to more than one genre?  Does a film’s genre stay the same over time?  Does a genre-based view expand or delimit our conception of a motion picture?  These are some of the many questions, concerns and misconceptions raised by the study of film through genre.

Selected Film and Literature Scholarship

Major Film Studies Project Overview: Disability and Deviance:  Film Genre and the Maintenance of Abledness as a Critical Framework in Film Studies (PDF)

This project builds upon recent work in disability and film studies, especially Sally Chivers and Nicole Markotic’s collection The Problem Body:  Projecting Disability on Film, Fiona Kumari Campbell’s Contours of Ableism:  The Production of Disability and Abledness, Martin Norden’s  The Cinema of Isolation, and Tom Gunning’s work on film genre.  What this project introduces to this rich discussion of disability in film is the idea that film genre affects the ways disability in cinematic worlds are classified and marginalized for the purpose of creating disabled identities by fitting the disabled into a narrative of deviance for surveillance, control, or amelioration.  Close attention to the formal elements of cinematic language provide insight into the strategies that “the maintenance of abledness” in sexed, raced, and modified bodies (in Campbell’s words) facilitates the representation of this marginalization.  In horror films, for instance, the strategy the film’s characters use is what I call “metaphoric disability.”  By metaphoric disability, I do not mean the ways that a disabled body is represented as a metaphor for emotional or spiritual deficiency, nor do I mean the use of disability related language in a metaphorical way.  Instead, a metaphoric disability is a trait, whether physical or psychological, that is treated as a disability to further marginalize one’s identity by imposing deviance onto the trait. In horror films, the use of metaphoric disability indicates to characters that they are always already less than the ableist ideal and, thus, always already deviant.

Email jamiemcdaniel123@gmail.com for inquiries about access.

“‘You can point a finger at a zombie. Sometimes they fall off.’: Contemporary Zombie Films, Embedded Ableism, and Disability as Metaphor.”  The Midwest Quarterly.  Volume 57, Issue 4 (Summer 2016).  423 – 446.

At first glance, contemporary zombie culture appears to participate regularly in the horror genres tradition of reinforcing a cultural association between disability and deviance. Indeed, these types of images are flourishing, as we are experiencing a zombie renaissance of sorts in literature and comics, in film and television, and in other aspects of society, such as politics. Many characters in these zombie and other horror films–from Franklin, the character in a wheelchair in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), to Freddy Krueger of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)–seem to fall within what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called “narrative prosthesis.” The concept of narrative prosthesis suggests that literature and film have historically and frequently depended on disability for two purposes: as a routine characterization tool or as “an opportunistic metaphorical device” (47). Mitchell and Snyder argue that authors and filmmakers have proliferated disabled characters in literature and film due to this reliance, which contrasts with the racial, ethnic, and gender identities that literary and cinematic history have traditionally marginalized through absence. In other words, disability demands a narrative. If a body does not conform to established definitions of “normal” or “average,” we want to know how and why.

“A Voyage into the Interior: Self-Possession and Reclaiming Somatic and Textual Property in Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone.”  The Latchkey:  Journal of New Woman Studies.  Volume 6, Issue Winter 2014.  Available:  http://www.oscholars.com/Latchkey/Latchkey6/essay/Jamie.htm

Debates about the effectiveness of the New Woman as an agent of social change abound in New Woman criticism.  Ann Ardis argues that nineteenth-century discussions of the Woman Question shifted from references to real-world effects of powers given to women earlier in the century to the New Woman as a primarily literary phenomenon later in the century.  Ardis writes, “Labeling the New Woman a literary rather than a ‘real’ phenomenon, these critics locate all ‘genuine’ change, all ‘real’ reform, in the nonliterary realm” (13).  This practice of relegating the New Woman to the literary realm would seem to negate any power she might have in criticising dominant Victorian values and practices. Margaret Drabble suggests that, in 1960s Post-War Britain, the “New Woman” “had to forge a new novel to describe […] new experiences” (“Mimesis” 7), revealing a set of challenges facing Post-War British new women such as Rosamund Stacey in The Millstone.  In this novel, Drabble seeks to negotiate a similar line between social engagement and literary representation.  Like her literary and social ancestors, Rosamund advocates for academic, economic, and domestic freedom, success, and equality.

“Disability and Deviance:  Dario Argento’s Phenomena and the Maintenance of Abledness as Cinematic Critical Framework in Horror Film.”  Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.  Volume 37, Issue 4 (2013).  625 – 637. Available: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11013-013-9345-8