Jonathan Knapp

Jonathan L. Knapp received his Ph.D. in Film and Visual Studies from Harvard University. Previously, he studied at San Francisco State University (M.A., Cinema Studies) and Bowdoin College (B.A., English, with a minor in Film Studies). Prior to his graduate studies, Jonathan worked in the film curatorial departments of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, and the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

His primary research focuses on the relationship between media and the environment. He is currently working on a book manuscript that draws from his dissertation project, which examines location scouting and location management practices for mid- to late-twentieth century American films of various genres, including war, the Western, science fiction, and a biblical epic. The project situates these filmmaking techniques within larger histories of land use, with a particular emphasis on films shot on public land. Future research projects include a study of the federal government’s use of audiovisual media to present the nation’s lands as “wilderness” and natural resource, and an examination of film and land art works that use sunlight as a form of cinematic projection.

Jonathan has ongoing interests in experimental cinema, landscape history and theory, media theory, posthumanism, and the representation of violence. He has written a book with Aaron Kerner entitled Extreme Cinema: Affective Strategies in Transnational Media (Edinburgh UP, 2016), which examines how numerous early twenty-first century films and videos (from American horror to works of the “New French Extremity”) obsessively depict the human body in heightened states of ecstasy and duress.

Jonathan teaches classes on a wide range of topics in film and media history and theory, including ecocinema, paranoia and technological anxiety, and genres such as science fiction and horror.