Dale Hudson

Associate Teaching Professor of Film and New Media and Curator of Film and New Media Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Email: dmh2018@nyu.edu

Research Areas: culture and globalization in film, television, and digital media

Dale Hudson’s research on culture and globalization analyzes film, television, and digital media to understand structural inequality, transnational migration, and political economy through frameworks of postcolonial, critical race, environmental, and animal studies. He is author of Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods and co-author of Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places. His essays appear in Afterimage, American Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Screen, and elsewhere, including the National Film Preservation Board of the National Film Registry of the US Library of Congress.

Co-authored with Patricia R. Zimmermann, Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) rethinks what we think of media after the digital turn by looking at how artists, intellectuals, advocates, and students think through important issues through digital media practice. The book analyzes digital media — interactive documentary, videogames, locative media, web series, mobile apps, gallery installations, new media art — at the intersections of imbedded technologies, transitory micropublics, human-machine interface, and critical cartographies to frame debates on participation/surveillance, outsourcing, climate change, involuntary migration, GMOs, and war from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Kenya, Nigeria, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United States, and elsewhere.

Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) examines how the supernatural figure of the vampire can allow for more nuanced understandings of the place of race within assumptions about citizenship, territory, and fantasies of nation. The book probes how film and television reanimate immigration comedies and miscegenation melodramas with vampires—and how web series mash them with hack-and-slash videogames and amateur vlogs. It unravels transnational Hollywood’s financing European films, dubbing Mexican and Philippine films, and off-shoring television production to Canada. Within these different Hollywoods, chador-wearing skateboarder vampires promote transnational feminism, African American and Mexican American vampires recover repressed histories, and anti-globalization vampires oppose austerity.

Since 2007, Hudson has been digital curator for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF). He co-curated six exhibitions with Sharon Lin Tay, including Trafficked Identities in association with the Global Alliance against the Trafficking of Women in Thailand (2011); curated Distributed Microtopias in association with EngageMedia in Indonesia (2012); and curated four exhibitions assistant curator Claudia Costa Pederson, including Interface/Landscape (2016) and Invisible Geographies (2017). He has also served on juries and selection committees for other festivals, including the Abu Dhabi Film Festival and Imagine Science Film Festival Abu Dhabi. He advises on the NYUAD Library's special collections of films from Gulf film festivals, and he coordinates films from the Gulf for the MESA (Middle East Studies Association) FilmFest for the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS).