Julia Katherine Sirmons

Julia Sirmons is a PhD candidate in the theater department. Most of my research focuses on relationships between theater and other audiovisual media, but I’m also interested in relationships between different media more generally. Much of how we define media and genres depends on how they make things seem real or true, and how they act on our feelings. I like exploring how media affect the relationship between thinking and feeling. I’m personally a big fan of a lot of genres that are criticized for being too much about feeling and not enough about thinking. My dissertation, for example, looks at films that are called "theatrical" because they seem too stylized or emotionally excessive. I argue that they are much more sophisticated than they are given credit for. I'm fascinated by true crime and spend a lot of spare time reading, watching or listening to it,so I'm really looking forward to teaching a course on it.