Professor Angela Ndalianis

Biography

Angela Ndalianis is Adjunct Professor in the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. Her research focuses on entertainment culture (films, video games, television, VR, comic books and theme parks) and the history of media technologies and how they mediate our experience of the world around us. Her expertise is in the transformative nature of media technologies – past and present – and how technologies impact on embodiment, the senses and perception. Her research focuses on the transhistorical and transcultural manifestation of the baroque as a perceptual regime driven by technological innovation. One of her passions is to explore the ramifications of many of these issues through the genres of horror and science fiction. Her publications include Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (MIT Press 2004), Science Fiction Experiences (New Academia 2010), The Horror Sensorium: Media and the Senses (McFarland 2012) and the edited books The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (editor, Routledge 2009), Neo-baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster (co-editor, Rodopi Press/Brill 2016), and Fans and Videogames: Histories, Fandom, Archives (co-editor, Routledge, 2017.

She has been the recipient of numerous grants. Her three ARC Linkage grants – ‘Superheroes: Creative Force, Cultural Zeitgeist and Transmedia Phenomenon’ (2016-19), ‘Play It Again: Creating a Playable History of Australasian Digital Games, for Industry, Community and Research Purposes’ (2011-15) and ‘Play It Again: Preserving Australian videogame history of the 1990s’ (2018-21) – are with ACMI as industry partner. Her four ARC Discovery Grants were on theme park experiences, theme park cities, robots as science fiction and as reality, and a baroque comparison of C17th Rome and C21st Las Vegas. She was also one of the lead investigators on a major Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant that examined the transatlantic continuation of the baroque (2007-15). A recent grant project is Imagining the Impossible: The Fantastic as Media Entertainment and Play, was funded by the Independent Research Fund of Denmark across three Danish institutions with international partners in the US, the UK, and Australia. She has published numerous essays in refereed journals and anthologies, and is currently working on three books: Batman: Myth and Superhero; Robots and Entertainment Culture; and Experiencing Space: Sensory Encounters from Baroque Rome to Neo-Baroque Las Vegas (with Dr. Lisa Beaven) supported by an ARC Discovery Grant. Angela was also a Trustee on the board of the National Gallery of Victoria between 2005-14. She was the H.C.Andersen Institute/University of Southern Denmark Visiting Professor (2015-18), and Visiting Professor at the University of Venice IUAV (March-June 2018) where she taught a graduate course on technologies of vision.