Ian Thomas Fleishman

Ian Thomas Fleishman serves as Chair of Cinema & Media Studies and Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Francophone, Italian & Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He holds affiliations with the Penn Program in the Environmental Humanities, Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature & Literary Theory programs.

Fleishman earned his PhD in French and German Literature from Harvard University, with prior studies at Freie Universität Berlin, Sorbonne Nouvelle, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Middlebury College. His academic trajectory includes serving as Visiting Professor for the Berlin Consortium of German Studies and as a two-time Affiliated Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry.

His research focuses on sex and violence to trace narrative evolution from modernism to postmodernism, with specializations in queer theory, film studies, and environmental humanities. Fleishman explores how narrative forms mediate experiences of injury, trauma, and ecological crisis, examining works ranging from Baudelaire to contemporary film auteurs.

His publications demonstrate consistent engagement with queer aesthetics, narrative form, and ecological thinking. Recent scholarship shows increasing focus on the intersections of porn culture, environmental imagination, and racial nationalism, particularly in transatlantic visual culture from Nazi propaganda to contemporary social media.

• Northeast Modern Language Association Best Book Award for An Aesthetics of Injury: The Narrative Wound from Baudelaire to Tarantino

Fleishman actively mentors graduate students and collaborates across disciplines, particularly in environmental humanities and queer studies. His current research projects include Homodystopia: Porn Culture and the Ethno-Ecological Imaginary and Counterfeit Identities: Camp Abjection from André Gide to Xavier Dolan, examining how narrative forms mediate queer subjectivity and ecological imagination.