Associate Professor and Chair
Focuses on film and media theory, documentary and avant-garde cinema, critical theory and cultural studies, film and video production, and critical political economy

Humanities 301C
651-696-6639

Website: https://www.morganadamson.info/

Morgan Adamson is a scholar-practitioner who works at the intersections of documentary and experimental cinema, digital media, and cultural studies. Her recent film, Brutal Utopias (2023), is an essay on the struggle to define social utopia through architecture that traces resistance to urban renewal in the 1970s and its aftermath in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis. She is the author of Enduring Images: A Future History of New Left Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which examines how cinema became a form of collective resistance within international New Left social movements during the 1960s and 1970s. She has published scholarly and popular essays on finance, race, and geographies of dislocation and social reproduction, and is currently working on feature-length essay film on the use of stadiums in times of war and crisis. Her work has been reviewed in CineasteFilm Quarterly, and Hyperallergic, among other places. Before joining the Macalester faculty, she was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow at Duke University. She received her PhD from the department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.

Recent Courses:

Documentary Cinema: Theory and Practice, Part 1 & 2 (yearlong course)

Oppositional Cinemas: Experiment and Critique through the Moving Image

Fundamentals of Video Production

Fall 2023 Office Hours:
To discuss the Media and Cultural Studies Major and Minor, please schedule an appointment here.