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Bio

T. R. Merchant-Knudsen is a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) at North Carolina State University in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, and they are an adjunct instructor at Wake Technical Community College. From 2017-2023, they acted as the Image Editor for Film International, and as an Editorial Board Member for the journal between 2024-2025.

Their interests in film and media studies are on intermedia sensory experiences, phenomenology and affect, formalist analysis, animation, sound design and music, global film histories, film and media theory and methods, visual rhetorics, and ambience within spectacular media environments.

MK’s writings have been published in Film Matters, Film International, Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, Cultural Intertexts, and more. Additionally, they have presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, the Society for Animation Studies Conference, the Popular Culture Association Conference, National Communication Association Conference, The Carolina Rhetoric Conference, Visions Film Festival and Conference, and others.

In addition to scholarly pursuits, T. is an independent filmmaker specializing in ambience, flickering, animation, and documentary. They are also an independent musician working within the genres of ambient, metal, indie rock, and experimental.

Area(s) of Expertise

Formalism, animation history, visual ambience, visual rhetoric, montage, archive studies, digital technologies, film theory and history

Publications

• Parting Words: Viewing films one image at a time; or, remembering Hannah Frank (1984–2017) , Film International (2022)
• Painting a Collaborative Gaze , Film International (2021)
• “Filmed Love Letters: The Dialogism and Intertextuality of Lost in Translation and her” , Cultural Intertexts (2021)
• Uncomfortable Laughter: Revisiting Funny Games (1997) on Criterion , Film International (2020)
• “Lost Inside Empire”: Self-Orientalization in the Animation and Sounds of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises , Southeast Asian Review of English (2020)
• Through the Haze: Fidelity of Adaptation in Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice , Language Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies (2019)
• Through the Haze: Fidelity of Adaptation in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice , Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies (2019)
• Reviews DVD/Blu-ray , Film Matters (2016)
• Reviews Film , Film Matters (2016)
• The Censorship of Art After Death: Looking at Stanley Kubrick’s History with Censorship , Film Matters (2015)

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