Jordan Brower

Candidate statement

I’m currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where I teach film and media studies. I’ve belonged to the MSA since 2013, when, as a graduate student, I attended the annual conference hosted by the University of Sussex. There, I presented the earliest version of arguments central to my dissertation and, thus, to my first book, Classical Hollywood, American
Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System (Cambridge UP, 2024). The MSA has provided me with occasions to develop ideas with people who have become some of my most trusted intellectual correspondents, most recently through the Film Studies special interest group.Even as I have begun work on the contemporary film and television industries in the United States,
my orientation remains rooted in modernist studies. For instance, my forthcoming essay “A24’s Academic Style; or, Coming of Age in an Era of Student Debt” argues that the producer-distributor devised a corporate strategy in part based on films self-consciously presented as inheritors of the modernist bildungsroman. I could not have conceived such an argument without the institutional
support of the MSA, and I would be grateful for the chance to pay down my debts, however partially.