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Tanine AllisonArthur Blank NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social SciencesAssociate Professor of Film and Media

My research and teaching focus on film, digital media, and video games. My current research explores CGI, visual effects, and animation, with an emphasis on digital performance technologies like motion/performance capture, digital de-aging, AI/deepfakes, and morphing. My book project examines how conceptions of race and gender impact the casting and design of computer-generated characters in contemporary Hollywood cinema. Despite how we often treat digital technology as politically and ideologically neutral, I show how the ”coded gaze” (Joy Buolamwini’s term) affects cinematic spectacles too. For instance, I explain why Andy Serkis, who played Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, became the face of motion capture instead of Ahmed Best, who played Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I explore the racial formations behind the creation of many of the most visible and beloved digital characters in American cinema, from Gollum to Avatar to The Black Panther.

My first book analyzed cinematic technology in relation to discourses of realism in the World War II combat film. Destructive Sublime: World War II in American Film and Media, published by Rutgers University Press in 2018, challenges conventional notions of the American war genre by showing how combat sequences are often aesthetically—and politically—radical. I introduce the term "destructive sublime" to denote images of war that turn violence into spectacle and excite spectators with a wide range of sometimes contradictory sensations. By using the language of the destructive sublime, combat films, video games, and other media temporarily upend traditional ideas about World War II, long portrayed in American culture as the "good war" fought for the ideals of freedom and democracy. Instead, the media I analyze—ranging from 1940s documentaries like The Battle of San Pietro (1945) to more contemporary media like Saving Private Ryan (1998), Dunkirk (2017), and the video game Brothers in Arms (2005)—use spectacular violence to remind us of the inescapable brutality and cruel devastation of war.



I have been teaching at Emory since 2011. I introduced the university's first courses on video games and digital media and culture. I regularly teach courses on these topics, including Digital and New Media Theory, as well as classes on CGI, Black Mirror, and television and digital media. I currently serve as the department’s Honors Coordinator, which gives me the privilege of helping our senior honors students complete their thesis projects in research, screenwriting, filmmaking, and photography.

In 2024, I was named the Arthur Blank NEH Chair in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences in honor of my achievements in teaching.

Education

  • PhD, University of Pittsburgh, 2010
  • BA, Brown University, 2001

Publications

Destructive Sublime World War II in American Film and Media