Research Expertise and Interest

world cinema, contemporary art

Research Description

Iggy Cortez is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; racialization in relation to labour and technology; the visual and sensory culture of digital media; debates on form and aesthetics across theories of anti-colonialism and race; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment.

He is currently at work on a book project entitled Wondrous Nights: Global Cinema and the Nocturnal Sensorium that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. Through a global range of nocturnal films, this project looks at the relationship between technologically-mediated perception and the affective and sensory dimensions of the historical present. His writing has appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023).

Cortez was previously Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and English at Vanderbilt University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Department at Swarthmore College. He has also curated exhibitions and film series at The Slought Foundation, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Penn Humanities Forum and The Lightbox Center.