Katherine Fusco, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Katherine Fusco

Summary

Katherine Fusco writes about the way different media forms shape identity and encourage us to be either cruel or kind to one another.

After completing a Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University, she spent several years working as the assistant director of the Vanderbilt Writing Studio. Since arriving at the University of Nevada, Reno, she has been proud to have her teaching honored by the Crowley Distinguished Professorship in the Core Humanities.

Fusco researches about and teaches courses on film, theory and 19th and 20th century American literature. She is particularly interested in silent film, genre film, theories of celebrity, the history of the American novel and literary realism, naturalism and modernism. At present, she is doing research on ideas of black and white childhoods during modernism and theories of personality and celebrity during the Great Depression.

Research interests

  • Film
  • Theory
  • 19th and 20th century American literature

Courses taught

  • Problems in Later American Literature: Affect Theory and Modernism's Media Experiments (Graduate Seminar)
  • Introduction to Graduate Study
  • Film Analysis and Interpretation
  • American Literature and Culture: Minority Cinemas
  • American Novel II: The Modern Novel and the Problem of Ethics
  • Transatlantic Survey: 1800 to Present
  • Major Authors in American Literature: Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hughes
  • American Literature: Mobs, Masses, and Monsters
  • Introduction to Criticism and Theory
  • Core Humanities: American Experiences and Constitutional Change

Publications

  • Silent Film and U.S. Naturalist Literature: Time, Narrative, and Modernity. New York: Routledge, April 2016.
  • "Better Travel through Brand Names: The Couture Grand Tour in Paris is a Woman's Town and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 62.1 (Spring 2016): 1-24.
  • "Squashing the Bookworm: Manly Attention And Representations of Male Reading in Silent Film." Modernism/Modernity 22.4 (November 2015): 627-650.
  • "Voices from Beyond the Grave: Virtual Tupac's Live Performance at Coachella." Camera Obscura 30.2 (2015): 29-53.
  • "The Actress Experience: Cruel Knowing and the Death of the Picture Personality in Black Swan and The Girlfriend Experience." Camera Obscura 28.1 (2013): 1-35.
  • "Love and Citation in Midnight in Paris: Remembering Modernism, Remembering Woody." The Blackwell Companion to Woody Allen. Eds. Peter Bailey and Sam Girgus. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
  • "Taking Naturalism to the Moving Picture Show: Frank Norris's Influence on D.W. Griffith's Narrative Development from A Corner in Wheat to The Birth of a Nation." Adaptation. 3.2 (September 2010): 132-154.
  • "Systems Not Men: Producing People in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland." Studies in the Novel. 41.4 (Winter 2009): 418-434.
  • "Brute Time: Temporal Representation in Vandover and the Brute and the Actuality Film" Studies in American Naturalism. 4.1 (Summer 2009): 22-40.
  • "Class, at Vanderbilt? Breaking the Silence at an Elite Institution." Class on Campus. Spec. issue of Diversity & Democracy. 11.3 (Fall 2008): 14.

Education

  • Ph.D., English, Vanderbilt University, 2008
  • M.A., English, Vanderbilt University, 2004
  • B.A., The State University of New York at Geneseo, 2003