Jonna Eagle

Professor

Degree

Brown University (PhD)

Area of Interest

Film and Media
Affect Studies
Cultural and Gender Studies
U.S. Social and Cultural History
Critical and Feminist Theory

Biography

Jonna Eagle is professor of film/media in the Department of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she has taught since 2011. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in American Civilization from Brown University and her B.A. in Cultural Theory from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her research is focused on the role of popular media and culture in the shaping of dominant affects and understandings, with particular attention to issues of gender, violence, and white supremacy. She is currently at work on a broad investigation of the cultural, affective, legal, and political status of guns across the history of the United States and the constitutive place and function of the white male victim-aggressor within this history. Her most recent book, War Games (Rutgers University Press, 2019), examines the militarization of American culture through a survey of simulated war experience, from tabletop games to military training simulations, documentary war reenactments to epic blockbuster films, videogames to drone interfaces. She is also the author of Imperial Affects: Sensational Melodrama and the Attractions of American Cinema (Rutgers University Press, 2017), which interrogates the appeals of both suffering and omnipotence as they shape the melodramatic history of American action cinema and the role of the white male victim-hero within it. Other work appears in Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity (Rutgers University Press, 2019), The Martial Imagination (Texas A&M University Press, 2013), and the journals Screen, American Quarterly, and the Journal of War & Culture Studies.