Alanna Thain is associate professor of world cinemas and cultural studies in the department of English at McGill University. She is the director of the Moving Image Research Lab (MIRL), dedicated to the study of the body in moving image media and expanded performance. She is former director of the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies. Her 2017 book, Bodies in Suspense: Time and Affect in Cinema, explores how cinematic experiences of unusual temporalities can create ethico-aesthetic opening onto what she terms “anotherness”, including our own, intimate strangeness to ourselves. She is currently completing a book, Anarchival Outbursts, on dance as a survival strategy in post-digital media, and a new project, Sexo-Somatic Technologies, on desire, distributed embodiment and feminist technologies. She directs the FRQSC funded research team CORERISC, the Collective for Research on Epistemologies of Embodied Risk, with its current focus on “Unruly Affects: Horror in Media and Performance” and co-directs The Sociability of Sleep, a research-creation exploration of sleep's sociabilities.
