UC Berkeley’s Division of Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome professor Iggy Cortez as of July 1, 2023. Cortez is an assistant professor in the Department of Film & Media and specializes in world art cinema; digital media ecologies; queer theory; comparative critical race studies; and American independent film.
His research interests include world art cinema, critical race studies, diasporic thought, the visual and sensory culture of digital media and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance and embodiment. Cortez has several projects, including a curated film series on representations of murder and nocturnal travels at The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the histories and afterlives of “race films” for the Penn Humanities Forum. Currently, he is working on a book project on nighttime as a conceptual threshold across recent world cinema to examine the relationship between technologically mediated perception and the sensory dimensions of the historical present.
After completing his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, Cortez went on to become an assistant professor in Vanderbilt University’s Department of Cinema & Media Arts. He also served as the coordinator for the university’s Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar and is co-chair of the CinemArts scholarly interest group at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies.