Michael B. Gillespie’s work addresses film with a consideration of collateral fields of inquiry concerned with aesthetics, culture, and historiography. This focus is coupled with a necessary address of art practices other than film (e.g. television, literature, music, new media, photography, installation art, photography) with the belief that the rhetorical intonations of film are significantly mediated by the larger concerns of expressive and visual culture. His current work includes Chester Himes and the noir tradition, the art of the racial grotesque, and visual historiography.

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Film theory and aesthetics, film blackness, visual historiography, genre studies, adaptation theory,
hiphop modernism, free jazz, and the Japanese New Wave.

PUBLICATIONS INCLUDE:
“Do The Right Thing” in Fifty Key US Films, eds. Sabine Haenni and John White (Routledge).

Forthcoming, “Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin and the Racial Grotesque,” in Black American
Cinema Reconsidered, eds. Manthia Diawara and Mia Mask (Routledge).

Forthcoming, “Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street, Passing, and Blackness” in Racial Passing Since
1990, ed. Julie Cary Nerad.