Iggy Cortez is a scholar of world cinema and contemporary art whose research and teaching are broadly concerned with diasporic thought and visual culture; epistemologies of the global; the visual and sensory dimensions of digital media; minoritarian aesthetics; cinema's relation to other media; and questions of sexuality, cinematic performance, and embodiment.
He is currently at work on a book project entitled Nights on Earth: World Cinema and the Nocturnal Sensorium that explores nighttime as a conceptual and sensory threshold across recent world cinema. Through a global range of nocturnal films, this project looks at the relationship between technologically-mediated perception and the affective and sensory dimensions of the historical present. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, camera obscura, Film Quarterly, ASAP/J, caa: reviews, Discourse, and several edited volumes. With Ian Fleishman, he is also the co-editor of Performative Opacity in the Work of Isabelle Huppert (Edinburgh University, 2023).
Cortez was previously Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and English at Vanderbilt University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Department at Swarthmore College. He has also curated exhibitions and film series at The Slought Foundation, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Penn Humanities Forum and The Lightbox Center.
