Film Studies Faculty & PhD Students

Professor of Film Studies

Dr. Adrienne L. McLean is a professor of film studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is the author or editor of numerous books including Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom, Glamour in a Golden Age: Movie Stars of the 1930s, and Cinematic Canines: Dogs and Their Work in the Fiction Film (all by Rutgers University Press). 

Research & Teaching Interests: Dance and film; film history and theory; women and film; classical narrative cinema and studio-era Hollywood; stars and star images; U.S. theatrical dance history

Associate Professor of Film Studies and Associate Dean of Graduate Studies

Dr. Shilyh Warren’s research and publications focus primarily on documentary film history and feminist studies. Her first book, Subject to Reality: Women and Documentary (U of Illinois Press, 2019) tells the stories of women documentary filmmakers from two key periods: the 1920s and 30s and the 1970s. She has also written about contemporary feminist documentaries, especially films that advocate for justice for marginalized people or raise awareness about urgent political crises. Her latest research projects focus on the history of psychoanalysis and especially the roles played by women in Freud’s Viennese circle in the inter-war years. 

Research & Teaching Interests: Feminist theory; psychoanalysis; documentary studies; global cinema; visual anthropology

Assistant Professor of Film Studies and Fellow of the Miriam Lewis Barnett Chair for Studies Related to the Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights 

Dr. Hanno Berger’s research and teaching focus at UTD is on depictions of the Holocaust, genocide and human rights. His first book Thinking Revolution Through Film: On Audiovisual Stagings of Political Change (de Gruyter, 2022) focuses on the relationship between the theory of political revolutions and movies that depict revolutions. It explores how audiovisual stagings enable the spectator to enhance the notions of political change. He is a co-editor of the Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism / Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (to be published in 2025 at Wallstein). He has published on German film history and on Hannah Arendt.  

Research & Teaching Interests: Film theory; German film history; genocide and Holocaust studies; Hannah Arendt; political theory; theories of revolution. 

PhD Student, Research Assistant

Rachel Catlett is a Humanities PhD student. Her research interests include horror and genre studies with a particular focus on feminist psychoanalytic film theory. Her current research focuses primarily on the Lacanian Gaze and jouissance in both horror cinema and digital games. She is currently working on a piece for publication that explores women directors’ embodied authorship in independent horror films, and her previous writing on television, film, and video games has appeared on KillScreen.com and The Mary Jane among others.

Research & Teaching Interests: Feminist film theory; film genres; horror in cinema and digital games; psychoanalysis; queer theory

PhD Student, Teaching Assistant

Abby Cole is a PhD student in the Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication program at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her work draws on feminist STS, digital culture studies, and documentary studies to explore the ways media and technology shape narratives, and social and cultural behaviors. Currently, her research focuses on emerging journalism practices with a specific interest in social justice and artificial intelligence.

Research & Teaching Interests: Documentary studies; feminist theory; digital culture studies

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

After graduating from Texas Tech with an undergraduate degree in Agriculture, Dalton Cooper decided to make a change and begin studying film. He graduated with a MA in Media Industry and Critical Studies from University of North Texas and began his PhD work at UT Dallas. He is currently working on his dissertation, “Kingmaker: How Henry G. Saperstein Created the Godzilla Franchise in America,” which discusses the producer and merchandise director who brought Godzilla to the United States. Aside from his academic work, he is also a musician, filmmaker, and gardener.

Research & Teaching Interests: Kaiju cinema; science fiction cinema; horror cinema; transnational cinema; media franchises; media merchandising

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Mazyar Mahan’s academic work has appeared in journals such as Mise-en-scène and The Spectator. He teaches courses such as Transnational Film and Video and Understanding Film at UTD. His dissertation focuses on the films made by Iranian expatriate filmmakers over the past two decades. He currently serves as the graduate student representative of the Transnational Cinemas SIG within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. His upcoming co-authored book chapter, which offers a transnational post-Third Worldist feminist analysis of Shirin Neshat’s Looking for Oum Kulthum, will be published in the Palgrave Handbook of Arab Film and Media. 

Research & Teaching Interests: World cinema; global art cinema; national and transnational cinemas; diasporic filmmaking; women’s cinema; contemporary Iranian and Middle Eastern cinemas

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Arya Rani is a global cinema scholar. Her publications include a chapter on the representation of masculinity and stardom in the web series BoJack Horseman, published in Aren’t You Bojack Horseman? Critical Essays on the Netflix Series by McFarland Books. She has also contributed to The Handbook of Indian Indie Cinema by Routledge (in production). Her dissertation, titled “Blink-And-You-Will-Miss-It: Aesthetics & Politics of B-roll in Cinema,” treats B-roll shots in films as a critical object of inquiry, through an interdisciplinary approach that combines methods and concepts from film studies and visual anthropology. At UTD, she has taught introductory film studies courses and is scheduled to teach an upper-division undergraduate course Lights, Camera, Wanderlust! in Spring ‘25.  

Research & Teaching Interests: Global cinema; early cinema; visual anthropology; feminist film theory; film comedy, celebrity studies

PhD Candidate, Teaching Associate

Brecken Hunter Wellborn’s in-progress dissertation, Millennial Pop Camp: Gay Politics and Hollywood Genre Films of the 1990s and 2000s, explores the queerly anti-normative politics of ostensibly normative mainstream films like Scream (1996) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003). This fall, he is teaching Film Authorship: Queer(ed) US Cinema, a new, upper-division undergraduate course that provides students with the tools to reconsider what defines a “queer film.” His academic research has appeared in The Popular Culture Studies Journal and The Avatar Television Franchise: Storytelling, Identity, Trauma, Fandom from Bloomsbury Academic; his popular film and television commentary has appeared on Collider.com. 

Research & Teaching Interests: Gender & sexuality; camp; film genres; audiences & fandoms