James Stone, Ph.D.

James Stone is chair of the Department of Film and Digital Arts at UNM.
Over the last five years, he has overseen the fruitful merger of two digital media programs; led his department through a highly successful accreditation and review process; and spearheaded the transformation of the university’s moving image curriculum, ensuring that students specializing as directors, cinematographers, and videogame developers can now enhance their practice by acquiring much sought after skills in team building and entrepreneurism. The rebranding of the department, coupled with an aggressive marketing and recruitment campaign, has resulted in a 49% growth in majors and pre-majors.

His primary academic interests are in British cinema, American popular culture, apocalyptic imagery, and gender studies. His monograph “America Through a British Lens: Cinematic Portrayals, 1930-2010,” was published in 2017 by McFarland. He has written about the relationship between terrorism and spectacle, notably in Duke University’s Radical History Review and in Akademisk Kvarter, a Danish journal of the humanities. He contributed a chapter on 1930s film star Jessie Matthews to The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film, and Music, a collection from Routledge. His essay on the Paranormal Activity films is included in the Lexington Books anthology The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture.

Recent publications—in collections by McFarland, Palgrave Macmillan, and Wilfred Laurier University Press—delve into the imagery of the Resident Evil movies, eroticism in the neo-noir Romeo is Bleeding, and the concept of nationhood in the World War II movie One of Our Aircraft is Missing.