Biography
MA in English, SUNY Brockport, 2020
BA in Cinema Studies and French, SUNY Oswego, 2016
Stacey Baran is a Literature PhD candidate at UC Davis. Her major research interests include American film genre, the environmental humanities and food studies, and US modernist literature. Her work examines the relationship between US cultural and cinematic iconographies through popular screen genre formation, histories of production, and public discourse. Stacey's dissertation, “Icornography: Specters of the American Cornfield in Popular Film,” considers the cross-generic deployments of the cornfield as a nationally inflected site in US cinema, arguing that the agricultural body on screen gives shape to the legacies of US colonial-agrarian aspirations, racial geographies of nation-making, and agri-technological anxieties in the modern global food system.
Stacey's writing can be found in Horror Studies, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Horror Homeroom, and an edited collection titled Youth Horror Television and the Question of Fear (Bloomsbury, 2024). With Dr. Matthew Vernon, she co-hosts Fear of the Dark, a film podcast on race and horror; they also co-publish on the Substack, Horror Movie Lexicon. Stacey is currently the Managing Editor of the Graduate Journal of Food Studies. For the 2024-2025 academic year, she was the graduate fellow in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Thinking Food at the Intersections, a year-long food studies research initiative.
Publications
- "Car Troubles: The Autophilia of Titane." Body Horror, eds. Elizabeth Erwin, Lauren Gilmore, and Dawn Keetley. Special Issue, Horror Homeroom 9 (February 2025): 98-107.
- "Once upon a Midsommar...: Nature, Nationalism, and the Swedish Folkloresque." Folk Horror, guest eds. Dawn Keetley and Jeffrey A. Tolbert. Special Issue, Horror Studies 14 (October 2023): 205-217.
- “Good Grief: Sorrows, Screams, and Silence in the Contemporary Horror Film.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video (22 June 2023): 1-19.
- “‘We’ve been teenagers forever’: Reference and Self-Reflexivity in Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated.” In Youth Television and the Question of Fear, eds. Kyle Brett and Ethan Robles. Lehigh University Press, 2024.
Teaching
- Associate Instructor: AMS/FST 55 Food in American Culture; ENL 3 Intro to Literature; UWP 1 Intro to Academic Literacies
- Assistant de langue (TAPIF): Lycée René Descartes, Lyon, FR, Fall 2017 - Spring 2018