Pamela Krayenbuhl, Ph.D.
About
Degrees
Introduction
I am an interdisciplinary media historian; my research and teaching focus on relationships amongst media and the arts from the 1890s to the present. I specialize in dance on screen.
My academic training was in rhetoric, interdisciplinary studies, comparative literature, and film & media studies, but I am also a contemporary ballet dancer and choreographer, so my 30+ years of dancing also deeply inform my research and teaching. Most of my current scholarship looks at dancing bodies in film, television, and video games. My monograph White Screens, Black Dance: Race and Masculinity in the United States at Midcentury (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), examines danced performances of masculinity by both Black and white male stars on mid-twentieth century American film and television.
Scholarly Interests
screendance; dance on screen; race, gender, & sexuality; film history; television history; media genres; stardom; music video; media authorship; popular culture; intermediality; film and media studies pedagogy
Teaching
- TAMST 220: Introduction to Popular Culture
- TCOM 343: Global Music Video
- TCORE 104/114: Introduction to Humanities (Science Fictions)
- TFILM 201: Introduction to Film Studies
- TFILM 220: Film and the Arts
- TFILM 485: Media Genres (The Hollywood Musical)
- TFILM 489: Screendance
Affiliations
- Society for Cinema and Media Studies
- Dance Studies Association
- Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
- Phi Beta Kappa
Krayenbuhl, Pamela. White Screens, Black Dance: Race and Masculinity in the United States at Midcentury. (Oxford University Press, 2025).
Krayenbuhl, Pamela. "Twyla Tharp’s Making Television Dance (1977) and the Technologized Dancing Body.” The International Journal of Screendance 14, no. 1 (2024): 58–72.
Krayenbuhl, Pamela. “The Dance Company Film.” Journal of Film and Video 74, no. 1–2 (2022): 61–74.
Krayenbuhl, Pamela. “Teaching Global Music Video.” In “Teaching ‘the Global’ in Media Studies,” edited by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies: Teaching Media Dossier 7, no. 1 (Winter 2022).
Harlig, A., Abidin, C., Boffone, T., Bowker, K., Eloi, C., Krayenbuhl, P., & Oh, C. “TikTok and Short-Form Screendance Before and After Covid.” The International Journal of Screendance 12 (2021).