I am an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and Chair of the Department of Arts, Film, and Music at Misericordia University in Dallas, PA. In 2022, I received the Louis and Barbara Alesi Excellence in Scholarship Award, the university’s highest honor for research achievement.

My research examines documentary media, visual evidence, radical activism, media infrastructures and ecologies, and emerging media technologies in contexts of occupation and global crisis. I am particularly interested in how media practices become sites of political struggle and civic action: how people living through war, occupation, displacement, incarceration, and human rights abuses use images, testimony, archives, and digital technologies to document their experiences, challenge dominant narratives, mobilize publics, and produce political change. Across my work, I explore the relationship between documentary media and broader struggles over evidence, visibility, representation, and political power.

I am the author of Radical Documentary and Global Crises: Militant Evidence in the Digital Age (Indiana University Press, 2021). In the book, I develop the concept of “militant evidence” to describe how documentary images, testimonies, and digital archives can function as forms of political intervention. Examining the Iraq War, the occupation of Palestine, the civil war in Syria, mass incarceration in the United States, and child soldier conscription in the Congo, the book traces how activists, amateur filmmakers, and artists transform documentary media into practices of witnessing, archiving, advocacy, and radical political action. I argue that militant evidence expands conventional definitions of documentary by demonstrating how images and media can be mobilized not only to represent events, but to expose, amass, and adjudicate evidence within ongoing struggles for justice. I discussed the book on the New Books Network podcast with host Gustavo Gutiérrez Suárez.

In 2019, I co-edited a special issue of Studies in Documentary Film on "Radical Documentary in the Globalized Age of New Media" which brought together scholarship on documentary practices emerging from the intersection of radical politics, globalization, and new media.

My writing has been published in Afterimage, Animation Journal, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Cinema Journal, Critical Inquiry, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Feminist Media Studies, InVisible Culture, Journal of Film and Video, Media, Culture & Society, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Review of Middle East Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, The Velvet Light Trap, and The Intellect Handbook of Documentary. You can stay up to date on my work by following me on Google Scholar or viewing my CV.

My current book project, Sites of Resistance: Radical Civic Media, Counter-Occupation, and Media Infrastructures in the 21st Century extends my research into the relationship between grassroots media, occupation, and political resistance. The project develops the concepts of “radical civic media” and “counter-occupation” to examine how Indigenous communities deploy grassroots media practices to challenge military, settler-colonial, narrative, and digital forms of occupation. Focusing on media practices in Western Sahara, Palestine, Jammu & Kashmir, and Australia, the project brings documentary studies into dialogue with Indigenous studies, media infrastructure studies, human rights scholarship, and media activism. It asks both what radical civic media can make possible for communities engaged in struggles for sovereignty, solidarity, justice, and revolutionary change and what political, infrastructural, and technological limitations shape those possibilities.

I teach widely in film and media studies, including recent undergraduate courses in Critical Media Studies, Social Justice in Film & New Media, Introduction to Film Studies, Global Contemporary Cinema, Documentary Film and Video, Art and Activism, American Independent Cinema, and the digital production course Introduction to Sound, Image, and Motion.

In addition to my scholarly work and teaching, I served as Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) at Misericordia from 2020-2026, where I supported faculty development, pedagogical innovation, and interdisciplinary collaboration across the university.