Doctoral Candidate
joshms@umich.edu
Office Information:
3047 Tisch Hall
hours: Thursday, 10-12
Department of Film, Television, and Media
Education/Degree:
MA for Research in Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, 2019
BA Film and Literature, University of Warwick, 2017
About
Originally from South Africa, Joshua grew up in the UK and received both his MA and BA from the University of Warwick. He is interested in the relationship between materiality, resources, and various forms of undervalued, undocumented, and often racialized labor across film history and into the digital era. His research develops a methodology for tracing such labor through a range of visual and written materials, as well as locating it within broader political and industrial shifts. In addition, as a lifelong horror fan Joshua also sustains a special interest in the genre's relationship to form, space, architecture, and ecology. Outside of his academic work, Joshua enjoys cooking and spending time in southern Italy.
Publications
- 'Drawing blood: The forms and ethics of animated violence in Watership Down,' in Watership Down: Perspectives On and Beyond Animated Violence, edited by Catherine Lester (London: Bloomsbury, 2023), 193-205.
- 'On-screening and Off-screening,' Screening the Past 46 (December 2022).
- 'Community's Human Laugh Track: neurodiversity in a metamodern sitcom,' in Autism in Film and Television: On the Island, edited by Murray Pomerance and R. Barton Palmer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022), 174-185.
- 'Green Screens: The Materiality and Environmental Impact of the Desktop Film,' Imago. Studi di cinema e media 23 (February 2022): 177-194.
- 'James Wan's Dead Space: The Conjuring Films, Siegfried Kracauer and the Revenge of Physical Reality,' in The Cinema of James Wan: Critical Essays, edited by Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns and Matthew Edwards (Jefferson: McFarland, 2022), 143-154.
- "A More Boxier Feel": Aspect Ratio, Architecture, and Ecology in A Cure for Wellness (2016),' CineAction 101 (December 2020).
- 'How De Palma Makes Us Feel: The Experience of a Moment in Body Double (1984),' Quarterly Review of Film and Video 37.4 (April 2020): 348-362.
- 'The ornamental and the monstrous: Exploring feminine architecture in Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977),' Horror Studies 10.1 (April 2019): 73-85.
- 'The Sacred Engine and the Rice Paddy: Globalization, Genre, and Local Space in the Films of Bong Joon-ho,' Journal of Popular Film and Television 47.1 (April 2019): 21-29.
