Jacqueline Pinkowitz

Jacqueline Pinkowitz, Ph.D., is an associate professor of media studies at Mercer University and serves as chair of the journalism and media studies department and director of film studies. She is also affiliated with the African and African American studies, women’s and gender studies, and Southern studies programs. She joined the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences faculty in 2021 after serving as visiting assistant professor of film studies at St. Lawrence University.

Education

• Ph.D., Media Studies, University of Texas at Austin
• M.A., Cinema Studies, New York University
• B.A., Media Studies and English, San Diego State University

Specialty

Film and media studies; African American cinema and Black media studies; feminist and queer theory; horror and the gothic; Southern studies; exploitation film; critical cultural studies; the long civil rights era

Professional Interests

Pinkowitz’s work interrogates the politics of difference in media and culture, focusing on race, gender and identity formation. She examines how slavery and its afterlives, the Black freedom struggle, and southern histories are remediated, especially in the civil rights and Black Lives Matter eras. Around dominant racializations, national formations and industrial structures, she explores minority (Black, queer) and alternative (exploitation, B) film histories, aesthetics and production-distribution. Her research and teaching center the gothic and horror; bodies, spectacle, and excess; interracial relations and white “trash”; and national-regional constructions and politics of place.

Current projects include: the Black (southern) gothic and indigenous gothic; Black aesthetics and Confederate memorialization; and reproductive body horror. She is also at work on her book, Screening Civil Rights: Race, Region and the American Film Industry during the Black Freedom Struggle (1955-75).

Pinkowitz teaches foundational courses in media and film studies as well as electives centered on media, culture, identity and power. These include horror and difference; African American cinema and queer cinema; race, gender and media; spectacular bodies; and the South on screen.

Recent Publications

• “The New Black Southern Gothic in MONUMENTS (2025-6).” “Gothic Blackness” issue of American Gothic Studies, edited by DeAnna Daniels. Forthcoming.
• “Reconstructing the Undead Confederacy in the MONUMENTS Exhibition.” Oxford Handbook of the Southern Gothic, edited by Michael Bibler and Sheri-Marie Harrison. Forthcoming.
• “‘The Devil We Know’: Vampires, Zombies, and the Monsters/Monstrifications of Racial Capitalism.” The Sinners Reader: Black Horror, Black Religion(s), and Contemporary Popular Culture, edited by DeAnna Daniels and Nicole Huff (Ohio State University Press). Forthcoming.
• “The Black/Body Gothic: Exhuming and Transcending Racial Mixing, Passing, and Slavery’s Afterlives in Lovecraft Country (2020). Black Camera: An International Film Journal 16, no. 2 (Spring 2025): 22-45.
• “‘This disgustingly sordid piece of garbage’: The Role of the Rural Abject, Violence, and Local-Texas Production in the Discursive Responses to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).” The Legacy of Leatherface: Essays on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Series, edited by Shane H. Weathers (McFarland Press, 2026): 15-35.
• “Civil Rights Exploitation Film Promotion as Antifeminist Misinformation.” Commentary and Criticism Special Issue, “The Mixed-Up Politics of Disinformation, Anti-Feminism, and Misogyny,” edited by Michele White. Feminist Media Studies 24, no. 1 (2024): 154-7.

Contact Jacqueline Pinkowitz, Ph.D.

(478) 301-4199
pinkowitz_jm@mercer.edu
Office: Reg Murphy Center for Collaborative Journalism, Room 114