Nathan Holmes
Associate Professor of Cinema Studies
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.
Currently I’m working on a project on Canadian cinema between the 1960s and 1980s entitled Dreamworld of Social Democracy, and have contributed critical essays to recent blu-ray releases of such 1970s Canadian films as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Heavenly Bodies, and The Rubber Gun. I’ve also begun teaching 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 and media 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 3550 Film and Media Preservation
- CIN 3140 Cinema and the City
- CIN 3740 Film Noir
- CIN 3095 Canadian Film and Television
Publications
Welcome to Fear City: Crime Film, Crisis, and the Urban Imagination, SUNY Press, 2018.
“Black Legion: Antifascist Hollywood in the 1930s” in Screening Classical Hollywood, eds. Luci Marzola, Paul Monticone, Chris Cagle, Routledge, (forthcoming).
“The Rubber Gun Show,” Blu-ray booklet essay for The Rubber Gun, Canadian International Pictures, 2026.
“Now or Never: Teaching 16mm Archiving and Preservation at SUNY Purchase,” Synoptique 11.1, 2025.
“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.