I am a scholar working in film and media studies, cultural studies, Cold War history, and literature. I earned my Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University (August 2020), defending my dissertation “Filmic Aesthetics and Technologies of War, Policy, and ‘Truth’ in the Motion Pictures of the United States Information Agency.” I serve as the co-head of the USIA and NARA-WWI projects within Dartmouth College’s Media Ecology Project (project leader: Mark J. Williams). I was also recently a Senior Consultant for an NEH Collaborative Research Grant, “Legacies of USIA Moving Images through International Lenses.”

My work primarily investigates the motion pictures of the massive Cold War-era office, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Within different regional and temporal contexts, I ask how policy, culture, and bureaucracy inform motion picture aesthetics, circulation, and reception.

If you’d like to read more about USIA motion pictures, my colleague Hadi Gharabaghi and I co-edited  a special issue in the Journal of e-Media Studies, “Motion Picture Legacies of the USIA” (Vol. 6, No.1, June 2022) (free and open-source). For extensive context, suggested methodologies, several media, and a literature review concerning USIA motion pictures, refer to our issue’s introduction, “The Motion Pictures of the United States Information Agency: Studying a Global Film and Television Operation” (2022, free an open-source). Some of my other recent scholarship includes my article, “Two Ways of Memory: The Signal Corps and CBS World War I Collections at the National Archives” (2024, free and open-source) and “Screening Sovereignty: Cold War mediations of nationhood in USIA motion pictures operations in the SWANA region” (2024).

You can also access my papers–as well as my full dissertation–on my Academia.edu profile. 

On Letterboxd, I’m working to assemble a rough canon of USIA motion picture, slowly adding agency films to the TMDB database. You can check out that list, as it develops, here on Letterboxd (I am very open to suggestions for additions!) or follow me on the platform @bret-vukoder. 

And if you want to hear me talk a bit about my research, I was invited to the re:verb podcast to discuss the character and legacy of USIA motion pictures in episode 44, “The Political Aesthetics of Cold War Propaganda.” Check it out here at the podcast’s website, or on any major podcast platform.

Before earning my doctorate, I attended the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, earning my M.A. in English and a B.S., completing three majors in English, Public Administration, and Political Science and a minor in Cinema Studies. 

I can be reached at bret.vukoder@gmail.com