Adam Knee

BRIEF BIO

Adam Knee is Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Media & Creative Industries at Singapore’s Lasalle College of the Arts. Prior to this, he held appointments at University of Nottingham Ningbo China (where he was Head of the School of International Communications and Professor of Film and Media Studies), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and Ohio University (US); and earlier still at other universities in the US, Australia, Taiwan, and Thailand. He has also been a Fulbright grantee (in Thailand) and a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. He has published widely on topics of US and Southeast Asian popular film—focussing in particular on issues of genre, celebrity, race, and gender. He is a co-editor of the Palgrave Series in Asia and Pacific Studies and also serves on the Editorial Boards of the Critical Asian Cinemas book series from Amsterdam University Press, the Taylor & Francis journal Celebrity Studies, and Plaridel Journal.

CURRENT AND FUTURE PROJECTS

Adam Knee’s current and near-future research focuses in particular on two main topic areas — firstly, the Southeast Asian horror film, and secondly, the representation of Southeast Asia (and especially Thailand) on screen. With regards to the former topic, Knee is interested in a comparative approach which highlights politically and culturally symptomatic trends and salient differences in genre productions from across the region. With regards to the latter, Knee has focused in particular upon historical shifts in the construction of “Thailand” as a kind of globally present imaginary construct, with suggestive continuities and differences among countries and regions.

RECENT REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS

1. “The Analogue Strikes Back: Star Wars, Star Authenticity, and Cinematic Anachronism.” Celebrity Studies 11, no. 2 (2020). Co-author: David H. Fleming.

“2. Where Got Ghost Movie?: The Boundaries of Singapore Horror.” Asian Cinema 31, no. 1 (2020).

3. “Training the Body Politic: Networked Masculinity and the ‘War on Terror’ in Hollywood Film,” in American Cinema in the Shadow of 9/11, ed. Terence McSweeney (Edinburgh UP, 2017).

4. “Vegetable Discourses in the 1950s US Science Fiction Film,” in Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film, ed. Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (Palgrave, 2016).

5. “Chiang Mai and the Cinematic Spaces of Thai Identity,” in Asian Cinema and the Use of Space: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Lilian Chee and Edna Lim (Routledge, 2015).