Research Expertise and Interest

feminist theory, semiotics, cinema, media, cultural theory, archaeology of media technology, poststructuralism

Research Description

Mary Ann Doane works in the areas of film theory, feminist film studies, cultural theory, and semiotics, and has also written on photography, television, and digital media. Her book, The Emergence of Cinematic Time, analyzes the structuring of time and contingency in early cinema and its relation to other discourses of time in the late 19th, early 20th centuries: in physics, physiology, psychoanalysis and philosophy. Her latest book, Bigger Than Life (Duke University Press, 2021), is on the use of the close-up in film practice and theory, and the way in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body’s relation to space in modernity.