Contact
Email christian.long@otago.ac.nz
Office: Burns 3N6
Google Scholar profile / Bluesky
Research interests and supervision areas
- Hollywood cinema
- Infrastructuralism
- Spatial analysis, usually featuring mapping/data visualisation
- Dystopian and post-apocalyptic film
- Bureaucracy
Background
Before coming to the University of Otago, Christian worked in a multiplex cinema, a public library, and a structural steel fabrication plant. After almost losing his left thumb, he decided to go to university, eventually earning a BA at Illinois State University, an MA at the University of New Hampshire, and a PhD at Vanderbilt University. He then taught in film and literature (and also worked in student support) at University of Canterbury. He moved to Australia, where, at Queensland University of Technology, he taught science and engineering PhD students for whom English was an additional language how to write better. He was a visiting professor of American Studies at the University of Vienna. He then worked as a bureaucrat in the graduate school at the University of Queensland while sometimes teaching in American literature and film.
Research and public engagement
Christian’s current work considers how the Hollywood spy thriller adheres to classical Hollywood use of the establishing shot, long shots, two-shots, close-ups, and extreme close-ups to provide the internally coherent world familiar to mass audience films. However, the consistency with which spy thrillers “break the rules” of editing these shots together – in “stylish” moments as well as in moments that seem simply to provide exposition – generates a parallel ideological structure that trains viewers to understand intelligence and violence as near-synonyms.
A second spy project takes a quantitative approach to understand the geography of American espionage as imagined in late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century American spy fiction. By analysing novels from ex-spies (WT Tyler, E Howard Hunt, Charles McCarry); Robert Ludlum and his branded co-authors Gayle Lynds and Eric Van Lustbader; and Dorothy Gilman, Alan Furst, Jason Overstreet, and Lauren Wilkinson, a map of the world emerges that accentuates some predictable places (Washington DC, London, Berlin, Moscow, Vienna), highlights less-predictable places (Havana, Istanbul, Vientiane), and leaves some places entirely off the map (Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, most of South America). In this way we can begin to understand that while mass-audience texts like spy thrillers purport to peel back the curtain to show a secret world they in fact end up generating further layers of obfuscation. That is, spy novels’ play their part in maintaining American global hegemony by limiting geographical imagination and resisting an expansion of geographic literacy
Christian wrote The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema, 1960-2000 (2017) and Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021 (2024). He also edited a collection about the American writer-director-actor Albert Brooks: ReFocus: The Films of Albert Brooks (2021), and co-edited, with Jeff Menne, Film and the American Presidency (2015). He and Jennifer Clement co-wrote an article on Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. Some of the open-access articles that Christian wrote include an article about the importance of Burt Reynolds to the changing face of American culture in the 1970s at Post*45; how the The X-Files’ Lone Gunmen figure in the mainstreaming of conspiracy thinking in US culture (and represent a missed opportunity for critical paranoia); a piece on how the sympathetic narrative treatment of the Rote Armee Fraktion in Der Baader Meinhof Komplex is undercut by the film’s use of montage in planning sequences; and a consideration of bros, macrobrews, and melodrama in the Fast and Furious franchise. Finally, he wrote a sort piece that offered limited but heartfelt praise of Kevin Costner’s post-apocalyptic box office fiasco, The Postman.
Christian welcomes PhD proposals in the following areas: Hollywood cinema; spatial analysis of film; infrastructure in/on/of film; genre; and transportation/mobility.
Teaching
Over the course of his teaching life, Christian has taught papers on Hollywood cinema, genre cinema, global cinema, film theory, documentary film, Shakespeare on film, utopian and dystopian film, American Studies, 20th century American literature (drama, fiction, and memoir), and 19th century American literature.
In 2025, Christian co-ordinates:
Publications
Long, C. (2025). Police, Adjective (2009), malicious compliance, and the potential of a good cop. Jump Cut, 63. Retrieved from https://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/ChristianLong Journal - Research Article
Long, C. B. (2024). Infrastructure in dystopian and post-apocalyptic film, 1968-2021. Intellect, 238p. Authored Book - Research
Long, C. (2024). The infrastructure of the Planets of the Apes. In J. Stümer, M. Dunn & D. Eisler (Eds.), Worlds ending: Ending worlds: Understanding apocalyptic transformation. (pp. 139-156). Oldenbourg, Germany: De Gruyter. doi: 10.1515/9783110787009-009 Chapter in Book - Research
Long, C. (2023). The Lone Gunmen who came in from the fringe. Contingent, (28 December). Retrieved from https://contingentmagazine.org/2023/12/28/lone-gunmen Journal - Research Other
Long, C. B. (2022, February). What post-apocalyptic movie would I want to live in?. The Vault of Culture: On Screen. Retrieved from https://www.vaultofculture.com/vault/onscreen/longapocalypse Other Research Output