Charlie MichaelAssociate Professor, On leave Fall 2026

Charlie Michael's research focuses on popular culture and the media industries in a global context. He teaches a range of courses across the film and media studies curriculum at Emory, and previously held appointments at the University of Miami, the University of Georgia, Georgia State University, and Georgia Gwinnett College. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Warwick (UK) and at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) in Paris.

Dr. Michael’s first book – French Blockbusters: Cultural Politics of a Transnational Cinema (Edinburgh UP, 2019) – theorizes and historicizes how new forms of commercialized filmmaking have changed what it means to make (or to see) a “French” film in the 21st century. His second monograph – Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: Youth, Race, and the Hypertext (Routledge, 2025) – analyzes the groundbreaking animation techniques, citational strategies, and racial politics of a contemporary classic of American youth culture. He is the co-editor of the Directory of World Cinema: France (Intellect, 2013) and his research has also appeared in venues like SubStance, The Velvet Light Trap, Transnational Screens, Quebec Studies, and Action Cinema Since 2000. Current projects include a co-edited volume on forgotten and underestimated directors of the French New Wave (forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in 2027), a longer work analyzing the production cultures of the Spider-Verse trilogy, and a co-authored volume about the emergent screen cultures of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora.