Faculty

Amy Rust

Associate Professor

CPR 365
arust@usf.edu

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Amy Rust is an Associate Professor, whose research and teaching explore how old and new moving-image technologies mediate relationships between spectators and their worlds. She holds M. A. and Ph.D. degrees in Rhetoric / Film Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her book, Passionate Detachments: Technologies of Vision and Violence in American Cinema, 1967 – 1974, investigates the rise of graphic violence in American films of the late 1960s and early 1970s by way of four technologies: multiple-camera montage, squibs (small explosive devices) and artificial blood, freeze-frames, and zooms Approaching these technologies as figures, as opposed to mere tools, she traces the encounters they organize between perception (what one sees, hears, and feels) and representation (how those sights, sounds, and feelings make meaning). Similar publications include articles about the freeze-frame (Cinema Journal) as well as horror (Films for the Feminist Classroom and Quarterly Review of Film & Video), including “Plugging In and Bugging Out: The Tortuous Logic of Contemporary Horror,” which rethinks dominant approaches to so-called “torture porn.” Dr. Rust’s recent work explores conjunctions between media and ecology, including moving images that investigate environments as well as those that forge ecologies in their own rights. Publications in this area include an essay about the hands-free mobile camera technology known as Steadicam (in the volume Sustainable Media) as well as works in progress about J. J. Abrams’s Super 8; documentary and experimental approaches to the Rust Belt; and Terrence Malick’s film Days of Heaven.