This book project traces how sharks have been imagined as monsters across media, from early modern sea monsters and the 1916 Jersey Shore attacks to Jaws, megalodon mockumentaries, and shark videogames. It examines how shark representations reflect cultural anxieties around extinction, extraction, climate crisis, and control. Alongside Hollywood predators and oil-rig revenge fantasies, the book also considers non-Western traditions in which sharks are sacred, not monstrous, as well as cute and awe-inspiring to offer vital counterpoints to the traditional Western deployment of sharks as embodiments of the fear of the deep. (Under contract with University Press of Mississippi)

This book explores how U.S. television has celebrated, normalized, and increasingly struggled with its deep attachment to fossil-fueled life. From Cold War jet-age fantasies to boomtown melodramas, road-trip idylls, neo-Western petro-masculinity, and speculative “post-oil” futures that still reproduce petro-logic, the book traces how television teaches viewers to desire mobility, abundance, and energy without limits. By reading drama, reality TV, travel programming, science fiction, and true-crime, the project reveals how American culture remains shaped by the pleasures, anxieties, and contradictions of petromodernity. (Under contract with Routledge)

This special issue of Film International, co-edited with Christian Quendler and Daniel Winkler, explores how European silent cinema captured and shaped modernity through its portrayal of landscapes, bodies, and technologies. The issue specifically focuses on rural and non-urban spaces as dynamic sites of cinematic transformation. Through diverse case studies, it examines how silent film negotiated tensions between nature and technology, gender and geography, progress and loss. From animated fantasies of petroleum-powered futures to mountain dramas and Transylvanian nationalist allegories, these essays reveal cinema’s role in visualizing the spatial, cultural, and political shifts of early modern Europe. (Scheduled as vol. 26, no. 4, 2026)

This essay collection examines erasure as a vital aesthetic and political practice across contemporary literature and adjacent media. In a moment marked by archival violence, censorship, and contested histories, writers and artists use erasure to reveal, resist, and reimagine systems of power. The project explores how blankness, redaction, and textual subtraction generate new forms of narrative, critique, and world-making, foregrounding erasure’s material and ethical dimensions. Bringing together questions of form, authorship, and memory, this collection shows how acts of removal can produce meaning, make visible what has been silenced, and open alternative ways of reading and imagining the social world.