BA, MA (UBC); PhD (NYU)

Kimberley Monteyne’s research interests are primarily rooted in American media and social history and include gothic cinema, educational film, teen film, the intersection between public health policy and media culture, and representations of African American communities – from nineteenth century prints to recent hip hop movies. She completed a PhD in Cinema Studies at New York University (2009) and has published a book entitled Hip Hop on Film: Performance Culture, Urban Space, and Genre Transformation in the 1980s, which won the Peter C. Rollins Award (best book on American film and television 2014) and was named both an Outstanding Academic Title and a Significant University Press Title for Undergraduates by Choice, a publication of the American Library Association.

The Pleasures of Public Health: Sideshows, Cinema, and the Stereopticon in Early Twentieth Century America is the tentative title of her second book project. This new work explores the ways in which Progressive Era health campaigns appropriated established and emerging visual technologies and performance styles including stereopticon projections, magic lantern shows,tableaux vivants, clowning, and motion pictures in order to stage their interventions. Such events also shared in the somewhat ironic practices of colonizing spaces of public entertainment and leisure – fairgrounds, parks, movie theaters, trains, and storefronts – that were frequently understood to be the avenues of proliferation, if not the very origin of public health threats. This project will show how the first systematized public health campaigns in American history were overwhelmingly preoccupied with, and in fact helped to shape and articulate modern forms of visual media, performance, and popular amusement culture.

Dr. Monteyne’s current and past courses include: Teen Film, New American Gothic: Spectres of Evil and Redemption in Recent US Cinema, The French New Wave, Early Cinema: A Survey of International Silent Screen Culture and Film and the City.