Max Bledstein

I am Lecturer/Assistant Professor in Film Studies. Before joining UCD, I was a sessional lecturer and tutor at the University of New South Wales, and I have also taught at the University of Sydney, the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Winnipeg, and Brandon University. I teach and do research on the cultural significance of aesthetics in transnational visual media, and my interests are in two main areas: film genre and comics.

In my forthcoming book, Contemporary Iranian Horror Cinema (under contract with Cambridge University Press), I explore how twenty-first century Iranian filmmakers have applied elements from Persian culture to the horror genre. Although horror films have not often been a part of the rich Iranian cinematic tradition due in part to strict censorship laws following the 1979 revolution, I argue that a small group of directors has made productive and provocative use of the genre. This monograph builds on my doctoral research at UNSW, which was supported by a Scientia PhD scholarship and won UNSW’s Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis. I have developed the research through prior publications and award-winning essays. My article on the film Fish and Cat (2013) appeared in the October 2021 issue of Monstrum. An earlier version of this essay won the 2021 Graduate Student Essay Award from the Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group (SIG) of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). I was co-winner of the 2022 Graduate Student Award from SCMS’s Middle East Caucus, and I won the 2021 Graduate Student Writing Award from SCMS’s Transnational Cinemas SIG. A chapter based on my thesis introduction appeared in The I.B. Tauris Handbook of Iranian Cinema (2024). My scholarship on transnational genre cinema also includes a chapter in ReFocus: The Films of Wes Craven (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and I recently guest-edited a special issue of New Review of Film and Television Studies entitled ‘Transnational Horror Media Now' (2024).

My work on transnational genre cinema shares with my research on comics an interest in how artists use popular forms to work through cultural issues. I published an article in Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society (2018) on the history of depictions of Abraham Lincoln in comics, and I have a chapter in the edited volume Drawing the Past, Vol. 1: Comics and the Historical Imagination in the United States (University Press of Mississippi, 2022) on representations of J. Edgar Hoover. My research for both of these projects began with my work as a Research Fellow for Project GraphicBio (2016-17), which examined biographical comics and was funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

I am Associate Editor of New Review of Film and Television Studies, a member of the editorial board of Studies in Comics, a contributor to Abstracta Iranica, and a member of UCD's Humanities Institute.