Dr. Borden is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Film Studies, and the University Honors College Researcher of the Year.
Dr. Borden was a founding member and director of the PSU School of Film, moving to the Honors College in fall 2022. She specializes in fin-de-siecle and gilded age visual culture, silent film history, classical film theory, gender and cinema, and undergraduate writing practices. She is currently researching a book-length study on nativism and American silent cinema and 19th century variety and vaudeville theater, writing a monograph about theorizations of consciousness and motion pictures in gilded-age American magazines. An excerpt from that project was recently published as “Shadows, Screens, Bodies, and Light: Reading the Discursive Shadow in the Age of American Silent Cinema.”
She has written about Hugo Munsterberg, Mary Pickford and Italian immigrant ethnicity, and depictions of sausage machines as part of a cycle of silent films. She has presented at SCMS and Domitor,and invited to speak at Freie Universität Berlin and Leibniz University Hannover. Her work has appeared in anthologies and journals including Media Histories, Screen Bodies, Jump Cut, Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema, The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, and Multiplicities: Cycles, Sequels, Remakes and Reboots in Film & Television.