Michael Anthony Turcios, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in Screen Cultures in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. He is faculty affiliate with the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research and the Latina and Latino Studies Program, and is involved with the Northwestern Prison Education Program.
Professor Turcios specializes in the histories of nontheatrical film and media, nontraditional audiovisual texts, ephemeral and nonextant media, and relational studies of antiracist and anticolonial movements.
His first book in progress, Relational Insurgent Medias, is a study of nontraditional film and media cultures of the 1960s and 1970s concerning Chicanas/os in East Los Angeles and Algerians in Paris, France. He draws on archival material and examines the representation of both communities in nontheatrical film (produced by academic publishers, government agencies, local television); film screenings in nontraditional settings (factories, worker quarters, community centers); independent audiovisual texts; and moving images in non-filmic contexts (photography and murals). Currently at work on a second book project, Professor Turcios historicizes Indigenous people’s media on subjects of cultural preservation, ancestral land reclamation, and fabulation as a media restorative method in Palestine, the Americas, and Indian Ocean.
In addition, his peer-reviewed research appears in Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies; Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism; and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. A forthcoming article will soon be published with Black Camera: An International Film Journal.
A first-generation scholar from a working-class background, Professor Turcios especially mentors students from historically excluded backgrounds and experiences.
Education
PhD, Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California
Publications
- “A Visual Culture History of Chicane/Latine Solidarity with Palestine,” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 11.1 (Spring 2024): 7-31.
- “Metaphors of Extractive Capitalism and Fabulation in Nope,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 51.1 (March 2024): 27-46.
- “Decolonial Expressions in Non-theatrical Films of 1970s East Los Angeles,” Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas 19.1 (Fall 2022): 19-34.
- “The Chicano Moving Image on Walls and Media Activism,” in Rewriting the Chicano Movement: New Histories of Mexican American Activism in the Civil Rights Era, 218-235. University of Arizona Press, 2021.
- “Bearing Witness to Ecocide: Contagious Imperial Infrastructures at the Borderlands of Mexico and Palestine,” Spectator 39.1 (Spring 2019): 36-44.
Courses
- Foundations in Screen Cultures
- Analyzing Media Texts
- Communication Foundation: Theory and Practice (Communication Studies)
- Documentary Film History and Criticism
- Indigenous Studies and the Moving Image (Northwestern Prison Education Program)
- Cinema of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean
- Third World Cinemas (Northwestern Prison Education Program)
- Film, Media, and Liberation Movements
- Race and Space in Film and Media (Northwestern Prison Education Program)