Contact Info
Shelleen Greene
Associate Professor
Shelleen Greene is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television.
Her research interests include Italian film, Black European studies, and digital feminist studies. Her book, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema (Continuum/Bloomsbury 2012) examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent, arguing that the changing cultural representations of mixed-race identity reveal shifts in the country’s conceptual paradigms of race and nation. She has published in the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Italian Culture, California Italian Studies, estetica, studi e ricerche, Feminist Media Studies and ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology.
Greene has presented at the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA), the British School at Rome, University of Bologna, Italy; the Calandra Italian American Institute, CUNY; the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference; and the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center at Indiana University.
Her work has also been published in From Terrone to Extracomunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema: Shifting Demographics and Changing Images in a Multi-Cultural Globalized Society(Troubador Press, 2010) and Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini (2020).
Prior to UCLA TFT, Greene was an associate professor of writing and critical thinking at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Bard College and her Ph.D. from the Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Greene is a recipient of the 2020-2021 Fulbright Distinguished Chair Award, University of Leeds, U.K.
BOOKS
Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema. London and New York: Continuum Press, 2012.
BOOK CHAPTERS
“The Black American Soldier: Italian Cinematic Reflections.” Italy and the Military: Cultural Perspectives from Unification to Contemporary Italy. (Co-authored with Mattia Roveri). Ed. Mattia Roveri. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 347-363.
“Racial Difference and the Postcolonial Imaginary in the films of Federico Fellini.” Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Federico Fellini. Eds. Frank Burke, Marguerite Waller, Marita Gubareva. Hoboken, NJ and Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell. 2020. 331-346.
“The New ‘Material Girls’: Madonna, ‘Millennial’ Pop Divas, and the Politics of Race and Gender.” Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies. Edited by Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2015. 13-26.
“Buffalo Soldiers on Film: Il soldato afroamericano nel cinema neorealista e postbellico italiano” (“Buffalo Soldiers on Film: The African American Soldier in Italian Neorealist and Postwar Cinema.”). L’Africa in Italia: per una controstoria postcoloniale del cinema italiano (Africa in Italy: Towards a Postcolonial Counterhistory of the Italian Cinema). Edited by Leonardo De Franceschi. Rome: Aracne, 2013. 93-108.
“La diaspora africana in Italia: immigrazione e identità nazionale in Waalo Fendo di Mohammed Soudani ed in Western Union: Small Boats di Isaac Julien.” (“The African Diaspora in Italy: Immigration and National Belonging in Mohammed Soudani’s Where the Earth Freezes and Isaac Julien’s Western Union: small boats”) in Un Nuovo Cinema Politico Italiano? Volume 1 (A New Italian Political Cinema? Volume 1). Edited by William Hope, Luciana d’Arcangeli, and Silvana Serra. Leicester, UK: Troubador, 2013. 187-198.
ARTICLES
“Beyond Reality and Fiction: William Demby’s Congo vivo.” Italian Culture. 38.2 (2020).
“Rhino/Rhinoceros: Experimental Cinema and the Migrant Condition.” California Italian Studies. 8.2 (2019).
“Bina 48: Race, Gender, and Queer Artificial Life.” ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology. (2016) Issue 9. DOI: 10.7264/N3G44NKP.
“Talking About Whiteness: Using Digital Pedagogy to Interrogate Racial Privilege.” Critical Pedagogies in Neoliberal Times. Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier Vol. 3(2). Eds. Courtney Bailey and Julie Wilson. June 2015.
BOOK AND MEDIA REVIEWS
Zero (Netflix, 2021). Produced by Fabula Pictures and Red Joint Film. Created by Antonio Dikele Distefano, Menotti, Stefano Voltaggio, Massimo Vavassori, Carolina Cavalli and Lisandro Monaco. Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies.10.3 (2022). 531-536.
A Companion to Italian Cinema. Wiley-Blackwell: Malden and Oxford, 2017. 618 pp. New Review of Film and Television Studies, 16:2, 210-215, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2018.1446733.
Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Alexander Weheliye. Duke University Press: Durham and London, 2014. 209 pp. Somatechnics. 6.1 (2016): 119-122.
“The Italian ‘Race’ and Its Discontents.” Bianco e Nero: Storia dell’identità razziale degli italiani. Gaia Giuliani and Cristina Lombardi-Diop. Milan: Mondadori Education S.p.A., 2013, 206 pp. g/s/i (gender/sexuality/Italy). August 2015.
Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Hamilton Carroll. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010, 221 pp. The Journal of Popular Culture. 45. 4 (August 2012): 917-920.
CATALOGUE ESSAYS
“Isaac Julien’s Expeditions.” Isaac Julien: Expeditions. Christina Dittrich ed. Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum, 2012. 30-59.
INVITED ESSAYS
“Italy and the Archives of Black Futurity.” estetica. studi e ricerche. Vol. XI – 1.2021, 31-44.
“Race and Ethnicity in Italian Film Studies” Diversity in Italian Studies. John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, The City College of New York. New York, NY, 2021.
“IT’S IN THE GAME ’17 or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection.” Black One Shot. ASAP/Journal. Eds. Michael Gillespie and Lisa Uddin. July 16, 2020.
“Il soldato americano.” (“The American Soldier in Italian Neorealist and Postwar Film.”) Italia A/R: Migrazioni nel/del cinema italiano (Italy A/R: Migrations to/from the Italian Cinema). Daniela Aronica and Vito Zagarrio, eds. Special Issue, Quaderni del CSCI, No. 8 (Annual Journal of Italian Cinema, The Center for the Study of Italian Cinema, No. 8) (2012): 177-179.
“Il Mulatto.” Italia A/R: Migrazioni nel/del cinema italiano (Italy A/R: Migrations to/from the Italian Cinema). Daniela Aronica and Vito Zagarrio, eds. Special Issue, Quaderni del CSCI, No. 8 (Annual Journal of Italian Cinema, The Center for the Study of Italian Cinema, No. 8) (2012): 208-209.
