Jonathan Risner

Jonathan Risner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington’s College of Arts & Sciences. He serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies and teaches courses such as COLL-C 103: Transnational Hispanic Cinemas, HISP-S 322: Introduction to Film Analysis in Spanish, and HISP-S 422: Argentine Cinemas. His research examines Latin American genre cinema, focusing on horror, detective, and romantic comedies, while analyzing intersections of local, national, and transnational dynamics.

• Ph.D. and M.A. in Comparative Literature from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• B.A. in English and Spanish from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Risner’s scholarship interrogates how genre films project or elide socio-political crises, including legacies of dictatorship, neoliberal policies, and urban decay. He explores amateur/home movies, paranoia, and digital culture (e.g., selfies and TikTok) in Latin America and Spain. His 2018 book, Blood Circuits, analyzes Argentine horror cinema.

His recent articles (2022–2023) address topics like neoliberal spaces in crime films, posthuman landscapes, and women’s horror cinema in Argentina. Earlier works (2015–2012) delve into zombie films, heterotopias, and transnational slasher narratives, often linking genre to political allegory.

Risner’s teaching emphasizes film analysis, transnational cinema, and cultural production. He leads seminars on paranoia in Hispanic film, horror studies, and the arts of self-representation from home movies to TikTok.