Vincent Longo

I am a media scholar, maker, and educator whose work links media production and the digital humanities with collaborative research and historical methods through the creation of audiovisual essays, documentary, creative nonfiction, streaming videos, podcasts, online databases, interactive maps, and extended/virtual reality. 

My scholarship focuses on the formation of media monopolies, histories of movie-going and audience experiences, below-the-line labor, and the work of Orson Welles. I study how the Hollywood studios emerged in the 1920s and came to exercise control not just of the film industry, but the wider media landscape, including television, radio, recorded music, and forms of live entertainment like vaudeville and Broadway theater. I also examine how, where, and with whom people watch entertainment—all of which can impact their meanings and experiences as much as the content of what they watch. Lastly, I write and podcast about what Welles’s career and collaborations reveal about broader issues of politics, industry, labor, race, and gender in American media.

I am currently finishing a multimedia book under contract with University of Michigan Press about the anti-fascist, racial, and labor politics of Orson Welles’s unmade adaptation of Heart of Darkness. My dissertation on the industrial and racial relationships between Hollywood and vaudeville, which I am currently adapting into a book manuscript, received the 2022 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award and a Robert De Niro Endowed Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. I have also published work on authorship, multimedia theater, archival studies, fair-use, and audiovisual essay pedagogy in The Moving Image, Screen, JCMS Teaching Dossier, and several anthologies.

I am an award winning educator, who recently co-won the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Innovative Pedagogy Award. I teach introduction to media production and a range of media studies (especially film history and theory) courses. Even in my studies courses, students make media: as well as learn the necessary technical, rhetorical, and creative skills. I also teach primary-source research methods because I believe that by looking at new or neglected material, they can more fully engage with and quickly enter scholarly conversations and tell new, unique stories. 

I am finishing two large-scale multimedia teaching resources. The Audiovisual Lexicon (under consideration at University of Michigan Press) is a library of short streaming videos for teaching critical terminology with each entry authored by a different expert from around the world. VR Citizen Kane (coming soon to Steam and Quest Store) is a virtual reality interface that teaches applied lessons in film style and film production by allowing students to “re-shoot” an animated 3D model of a scene from Citizen Kane with a virtual camera in a VR environment or on a desktop computer.