Department of Gender Studies

Dr. David Church is a film and media scholar whose work focuses on the historical and contemporary circulation of culturally disreputable genres (e.g., exploitation, horror, and adult films). His research agenda explores how filmmakers, media industries, and fan cultures revalue and make contemporary use of the pastness and materiality associated with genres that, whether through aesthetic shortcomings or outdated politics, have otherwise seemed destined for the dustbin of history. He earned his Ph.D. in Film and Media Studies from Indiana University in 2014, and before returning to IU, he served as Lecturer and Program Coordinator of the Cinema Studies program at Northern Arizona University. He is also a founding member and programmer for SECS Fest, the Seattle Erotica Cinema Society’s annual sex-positive erotic film festival.

His first single-authored book, Grindhouse Nostalgia: Memory, Home Video, and Exploitation Film Fandom (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), looks at how nostalgia for physical spaces like drive-in theaters and grind houses has grown within exploitation film fandom as compensation for fans’ devotion to films that have gradually garnered more mainstream accessibility across video formats like VHS, DVD, and online video. Moreover, the book analyzes the recent cycle of retro-styled genre pastiches like Grindhouse as reflections of political anxieties among convergence-era subcultures that deliberately turn toward the past for present-day inspiration. His follow-up book, Disposable Passions: Vintage Pornography and the Material Legacies of Adult Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), extends this research on nostalgia and taste into archival and historiographic questions about how the historicity of pre-1980s adult cinema is eroticized in its present-day consumption as “vintage” pornography. Drawing on extensive research at the Kinsey Institute and interviews with adult video industry members, the book argues that pornography’s erotic tension between the revelation and concealment of sexual spectacle becomes mirrored at a meta-cinematic level through an “archival striptease” created by the unexpected survival of adult films that fans earnestly celebrate as more than autoerotic fodder.

His most recent book is the short monograph Mortal Kombat: Games of Death (University of Michigan Press, 2020), about how martial-arts films influenced the cinematic qualities that created a moral panic around video game violence in the early 1990s. The book combines media industry analysis and reception study to explore how Mortal Kombat’s movement from arcade game to home consoles to transmedia franchise threatened to collapse disreputable public spaces into the domestic sphere at a time when 16-bit consoles were achieving widespread market penetration, thus allowing Mortal Kombat’s adaptability to serve as a referendum for the technological affordances of new platforms and the cultural value of fighting games as a genre.

He is currently writing a new book on so-called “elevated” or “post-horror” films as one of the horror genre’s most important and controversial developments since 2010. In addition to these single-authored works, he is the editor of Playing with Memories: Essays on Guy Maddin (University of Manitoba Press, 2009), a special issue of Porn Studies, and a dossier on adult film history for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.