Christina Parker-Flynn

Dr. Parker-Flynn is the current Director of the Literature, Media, and Culture Program and the President of the Literature/Film Association, the largest active scholarly organization devoted to the study of literature and film, with a particular emphasis on the adaptation between these forms, as well as other evolving media, such as television, video games, and new media.

Parker-Flynn’s research centers around the engagements and cross-disciplinary developments between film, literature, art, technology, and environment, with a particular focus on the question of artificiality. She teaches a range of film courses which include topics in adaptation studies, classical and contemporary film theory, film history and its emergence from 19th-century literature and culture, film noir, meta-Hollywood, etc.

Her first book, Artificial Generation: Photogenic French Literature and the Prehistory of Cinematic Modernity (2021), investigates the intersection of film theory and nineteenth-century literature, arguing that the depth of amalgamation that occurred within literary representation during this era aims to replicate an illusion of life and its sensations, in ways directly related to broader transitions into our modern cinematic age. Artificial Generation provides a crucial reassessment of the longstanding, mutual exchange between cinematic and literary reproduction, offering an innovative perspective on the proto-cinematic imperative of simulation within nineteenth-century literary symbolism. It investigates how a particularly artificial generation of writers—including Thèophile Gautier, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Oscar Wilde—prepared the conceptual ground for the emergence of film on a psycho-cinematic level, and how important contemporary films—from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) to Blade Runner 2049 (2017)—are often structured around the prior century’s mythic and literary principles.