Scott Bukatman

Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman has been published in abundant journals and anthologies, including October, Critical Inquiry, Camera Obscura, and Science Fiction Studies.

Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins used Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics to better understand the ways in which comics engage and engross their readers. In his recent monograph on Black Panther, published in the 21st Century Film Essentials series (University of Texas Press), Bukatman considers how the movie offers a fantasy of liberation and social justice while demonstrating the power of popular culture to articulate ideals and raise vital cultural questions.