I am a media historian who researches the relationship between race, labor, and material resources in media production. I am drawn to labor categories often obfuscated or even excluded from traditional studio records; as such, I turn to alternative and non-traditional archival sources to account for the film industry’s complex relationship to race and labor across periods of industrial change and turmoil.

My current book project, “Working Below Below-the-Line: Local Labor and Location Shooting in World War II Hollywood,” argues that wartime conditions prompted the major studios to circumvent the labor strife plaguing the industry in Los Angeles by recruiting local labor on location and hiring from non-unionized groups. I frame this labor as an emergent category, and one that did not benefit from the same protection and representation as those in the unionized studio system. To account for their extraneity from the traditional above- and below-the-line distinction, I describe these workers as operating “below below-the-line.” In addition to studio collections and trade papers, the project makes ample use of local newspapers, house organs, and ephemera in order to understand how wartime film productions interacted with the location, and to center the experiences of marginalized workers often excluded from studio production records.

I am an Assistant Professor of Teaching in Film in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University. I teach a range of introductory lecture classes on both film analysis and history, as well as upper-level seminars on various topics. I received my PhD from the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan in 2025, where my doctoral dissertation was awarded the ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. I also hold an M.A. for Research in Film and Television Studies and a B.A. in Film and Literature, both from the University of Warwick.