Nathan Holmes
Associate Professor of Cinema Studies
I’m interested in cinema’s relation to cities, public life, and social class.
My writing and research takes up cinema’s interactions with urban history and culture, film and media theory, Frankfurt School critical theory and the political imagination of mass culture.
In 2018, I published Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination (SUNY Press). This book examines how location-shot American crime films of the 1970s expressively engaged with urban decline, deindustrialization, and racial division, ultimately producing new ways of seeing and understanding cities.
I have also written articles related to race and the American suburbs, ciné-genres, and chase sequences, and contributed essays to recent Blu-ray releases of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Heavenly Bodies for Fun City Editions.
More recently I’ve been working on topics in Canadian cinema and film archiving and preservation. Along with students I run the Purchase Film Archive, which is dedicated to preserving and programming 16mm film on campus.
More About Me
I received my PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and have taught classes in film, media, and cultural studies at the University of Iowa, Loyola University, University of New Brunswick, and Baruch College. Currently I’m an editor at Mediapolis: The Journal of Cities and Culture.
In my classes, students explore the transnational nature of film and media history, as well as cinema’s relationship to popular visual culture and social transformation. I’m particularly interested in the way that moving images allow us to experience, reflect on, and talk about a shared world.
Representative Courses
- CIN 3055 Cinema and Class
- CIN 3740 Film Noir
- CIN 3005 Cinema and the Archive
- CIN 3140 Cinema and the City
Publications
Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination, SUNY Press, 2018.
“Technicolor Torontopia,” Blu-ray booklet essay for Heavenly Bodies, Fun City Editions, 2024.
“Vulgar Canadianism,” Blu-ray booklet essay for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Fun City Editions, 2023.
“Highways through the Void: Chase Sequences and the Built Environment,” New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 20, 2022.
“Towards a Catalogue of Cine-genres,” (with Colin Williamson), New Review of Film and Television Studies, Vol. 20, 2022.
“The Possibilities of Suburban Iconoclasm,” in Race and the Suburbs in American Film, SUNY Press, 2020.
“Deep Backgrounds: Landscapes of Labor in All the President’s Men,” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies/Revue d’etudes interculturelle de l’image, Fall 2018.
“Rudolph Arnheim: Cinema and Partial Illusion,” in Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice, Rutgers University Press, 2015.