nicole morse

About

Nicole Morse
PhD, University of Chicago, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, 2018
BFA, Film Conservatory, State University of New York at Purchase College, 2010

Email:  morsen@fau.edu
Phone : 561-297-2623
Areas of Expertise: Cinema Studies, New Media, Social Media, Trans Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Theory, Documentary Production

Moving across television, pornography, social media, new media, and experimental video, my research looks at agency, self-representation, authorship, and spectatorship. I draw on close analyses informed by trans studies, critical race theory, and queer theory to explore relationships between creators and spectators. I see the author-audience encounter as a model of self-other relations, and my research into ephemeral media revolves around the utopian potential that media creates new, even posthuman subject positions.
 
My book project, tentatively titled “Selfie Aesthetics,” analyzes selfies by trans women and transfeminine artists to reveal how they produce new ways of being and relating in the digital era. Combining readings of individual images with accounts of selfie spectatorship, I demonstrate that selfie aesthetics articulate posthuman selves that are networked, relational, and multiple. Other recent publications look at the visual rhetoric of doubling in the television show “Transparent,” at gestural humor in reality television, the function of captions on Instagram, and how pornography has been used as a tool within sex research.
 
As a media maker, I focus on participatory documentary and experimental video. My participation in the Scholarship in Sound and Video Workshop in 2017 developed my skills in videographic criticism, which I incorporate into my teaching whenever possible. A video essay on “Transparent” will be featured in a special issue of [in]Transition.
 
Recent Publications:
 
“Authenticity, Captioned: Hashtags, Emojis, and Visibility Politics in Alok Vaid-Menon’s Selfies,” Media/Culture, vol. 20, no. 3 (2017).

“Seeing Double: Visibility, Alternative Temporality, and Transfeminine History in Transparent,” Jump Cut 57 (2016),

“A Double-Take on Reality Television: Laverne Cox’s Political and Pedagogical Gestural Humor,” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 16 (2016), pp. 168-180.

“Pornography in Sex Research: The Construction of Sex, Gender, & Sexual Orientation,” Porn Studies, vol. 2, no. 4 (2016), pp. 314-328. 
 
Other Writing:
 
Review of Ilan Stavans’s “I Love My Selfie” for boundary2, 

“Daughter, Mother, Mirror: Zackary Drucker's Southern For Pussy,” Open TV – Beta (2015),  

Courses

COM 4094: Media and Sexual Idenities

MMC 4501: Media Criticism

MMC 4263: Media, Culture, and Technology

 

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