Biography
Peter J. Bloom is Professor of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa
Barbara, and served as Department chair from 2020-23. He has published widely on
British, French, and Belgian colonial media including French Colonial
Documentary, Frenchness and the African Diaspora (co-editor), and Modernization as
Spectacle in Africa (co-editor), among other publications. He recently completed a co-
edited volume with Dominique Jullien, entitled Screens and Illusionism: Alternative
Teleologies of Mediation (Edinburgh University Press, 2024). With a geographical focus
on West Africa and Southeast Asia, he is preparing a monograph entitled, Radio-
Cinema Modernity: The Catoptrics of Empire. In addition, he is working on several other
projects focused on media technologies of performance, the adaptation of nkisi nail
sculpture idioms by contemporary African artists, and global film and media studio
production sites as a study of locality and delocalization. He teaches a wide array of
graduate and undergraduate courses; in Winter 2025, he will be teaching an
undergraduate lecture course on Film Theory (FAMST 192FT).