Jennifer M. Barker is Associate Professor of Communication at Georgia State University, USA. She is the Director of Graduate Studies for the Moving Image Studies' doctoral program and of the Film, Video, and Digital Image masters program. Barker researches in the area of moving image studies, with particular interests in cinema and the senses, synaesthesia, theories of spectatorship and embodiment, performance, feminism, as well as documentary.

In 2009, Barker published The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience, which discusses the sensuous exchange between film and viewer and was a finalist for the “Best Book on Moving Image Studies” prize that year. Currently she is working on Synaesthetic Cinema, an interdisciplinary project that will be the first book-length study of synaesthesia informed by and focused on cinema and moving-image theory.

Selected publications

Be-hold: Touch, Temporality, and the Cinematic Thumbnail Image. In: Discourse. Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 35.2 (2014): 194-211.

A Surrealist Turn: Transformative Gesture in THE BIRDS. In: Sternagel/Levitt/Mersch (eds.), Acting in Moving-Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, and Renderings. Transcript 2012, 211-231.

The Tactile Eye. Touch and the Cinematic Experience. University of California Press 2009.