Biography
MA in English, SUNY Brockport, 2020
BA in Cinema Studies and French, SUNY Oswego, 2016
Stacey Baran is a Literature PhD candidate at the University of California, Davis. Her major research interests include American film genre (primarily horror), food studies, critical race, and US modernist literature. Her dissertation project, "Specter of the Stalk," explores the cornfield as a trope of setting and space in the iconographies of US American horror and popular film genres, meshing film interpretation and reception analysis with cultural approaches to cinema histories and cross-genre evolution. The project argues for a cinematic agricultural imaginary in American film from the 1960s to the present, whereby anxieties around national/regional identity and race are inflected through the cornfield’s architectural, oneiric, and (post)planetary depictions on screen.
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 podcast on race, horror, and film. Stacey is currently the Managing Editor of the Graduate Journal of Food Studies; and 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