Bio

David Bering-Porter is adjunct assistant professor of Modern Culture & Media at Brown University.  He received his Ph.D. in Modern Culture & Media from Brown University in May 2011 and is currently teaching courses related to his expertise and interests and actively pursuing his research agenda on embodied and “undead” media within the fields of New Media, Film Studies, and Media Archaeology.

His dissertation, Undead: Bodies and Codes of Uncanny Vitality in the Media of Late Capitalism, examined the shifts in reproduction, knowledge, and power that remap our notion of “life” in contemporary scientific and popular cultures through the uncanny vitality of the undead. The objects of this study move from the zombie in Haitian myth and American cinema to the recessive trait in the history of genetics and the way in which the body is mediated as a “natural” object and a sovereign entity. The body has always been the site for mediation, particularly for markers of identity such as race, gender, and self-improvement and my dissertation looks at the ways in which these symbolic markers work on screen, around the body, and in the flesh.

David’s expertise in cinema and new media studies moves across the borders of theory to practice and he has served as Assistant Managing Editor for the scholarly journal Digital Humanities Quarterly, where he was able to engage in ongoing discussions about digital technologies, cultures, and pedagogy. In 2007, he was an organizer and co-curator for the Providence Zombie Film Festival, which brought a wide variety of zombie movies to the public (free of charge) and which was closely integrated with his research on the zombie in popular cinema and culture. David’s current research extends the work from my dissertation and considers the place of undead media in contemporary culture through memory, biopower, and the body.