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.

TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS
Professor Gillespie’s teaching and research includes film theory, genre studies, black visual and expressive culture, historiography, global cinemas, and adaptation theory. His teaching and research is driven by an interdisciplinary regard for the study of art and culture. Professor Gillespie has previously taught at The New School in the Department of Media Studies and Film, Duke University in the Program of Film and Video and Department of African and African American Studies, and New York University.

PUBLICATIONS INCLUDE:
“Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin, Film Blackness, and the Racial Grotesque,” Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, ed. Mia Mask (Routledge, 2012).

“‘To Do Better’: Notes on the Work of Kevin Jerome Everson.” Kevin Jerome Everson (Chicago: Video Data Bank, 2011).

“Do The Right Thing” Fifty Key US Films, eds. Sabine Haenni and John White (London and New York: Routledge, 2009).

“Smiling Faces: Chameleon Street, Racial Passing, and Racial Performativity.” The Politics of Appearance: Racial Passing in U.S. Fiction, Memoir, Television, and Film, 1990-2010, ed. Julie Cary Nerad (Forthcoming).

“Two Nigs From West Compton: A Conversation with Kevin Jerome

Everson” Coon Bidness [The Advanced Ebonics Issue] eds. Nicole Fleetwood and Greg Tate (Forthcoming).

“Dead Nigger Storage: Blackness, Art, and The Racial Grotesque,” Post-Soul Satire: An Interdisciplinary Critical Overview, eds. Derek Maus and Jim Donahue (University Press of Mississippi, Forthcoming).

Works In Progress
Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film
Co-editor, Black Cinema Aesthetics Revisited.
Co-editor, New Chester Himes Criticism.
Co-editor, Special Issue of Callaloo: Black Diasporic Cinema

Courses Taught: Introduction to Cinema Studies, The Art of Film, Film History II, Film History III, Film Adaptations, Japanese New Wave Cinema, Critical Diasporic Cinema, Visual Historiography, Film Blackness, The Films of Spike Lee, Chester Himes and the Noir Tradition, Black Visual Culture, Noir of the 1990s, Blackness and the Arts, Hip Hop Cinema.

Conference Presentations: Society of Cinema and Media Studies, World Picture, African Literature Association, American Studies Association, The Experience Music Project Pop Conference.