About Caetlin

Caetlin Benson-Allott is Professor of English and Film & Media Studies at Georgetown University and Director of its Film & Media Studies Program. She is the author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television (University of California Press, 2021), Remote Control (Bloomsbury, 2015), and Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (University of California Press, 2013). She served as Editor of JCMS (formerly Cinema Journal), the scholarly publication of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, from 2018 through 2022.

Prof. Benson-Allott received her PhD from Cornell University and her AB from the University of California, Berkeley. Her work in US film history, film and television theory, material culture, and cinematic and domestic media technologies has appeared in multiple anthologies as well as Cinema Journal, Television & New Media,  Journal of Visual Culture, Jump Cut, Film Quarterly,  New Review of Film and Television Studies,  Quarterly Review of Film and Video,  Feminist Media Histories, South Atlantic Quarterly, Slate, the Atlantic, and the Washington Post. Her doctoral dissertation won the Society for the Cinema and Media Studies’s Best Dissertation Award in 2009. After winning Film Quarterly's 50th Anniversary Review Essay Competition in 2008, she continued to write for the journal and became a regular columnist in 2011, a position she still holds. In 2017, she was elected Editor of Cinema Journal the Society for Cinema and Media Studies's scholarly publication of record, and led its transformation into JCMS, a more accessible and inclusive digital-first journal complete with additional open-access content.

Prof. Benson-Allott’s most recent book, The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television, argues that the material objects and forces we encounter around film and television change how we make sense of their content, not to mention the very concepts film and television. Each of its six chapters analyzes a different intersection in material media culture: the remediation of legacy television on home video, deteriorating media and the loss of film history, network-branded merchandise and consumer experiences, alcoholic concessions and the future of cinema, cannabis culture and contemporary television, and cinema violence and panicked reception cultures. Many of the objects in these studies are familiar and taken for granted, yet they radically alter viewers' sense of themselves, their media, and their world.

Prof. Benson-Allott teaches courses on US film history, film and television theory, queer cinema, spectatorship studies, and the horror genre. She lives in Washington, DC with her partner and two shih tzu.