Jennifer Malkowski

Jennifer Malkowski writes and teaches about digital media (especially video games, Internet video, digital cinema and social media); documentary; death and dying; and race, gender and sexuality in media. They are particularly interested in the links between “old” and new media and the way new technologies reshape—or fail to reshape—social and political power.

Their book, Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary (Duke University Press, 2017), analyzes how documentarians have captured death from mid-19th-century mourning photographs to #BlackLivesMatter YouTube videos. The book illustrates the ways technological developments have drastically altered that practice and asks: When these two elements combine, what does death as a subject reveal about the digital, and what do digital technologies reveal about death?

Malkowski is the co-editor of the book Gaming Representation: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Video Games, co-editor of a special issue of American Literature (“American Game Studies”), and the co-editor of the book series Power Play: Games, Politics, Culture from Duke University Press. Their work has also been published in Cinema Journal, Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, and the edited collections Queers in American Popular Culture, Unwatchable, Writing about Screen Media, and A Tumblr Book: Platforms and Cultures.

At Smith, Malkowski is the founder of the college’s Video Game Research Lab, located in Hillyer Hall 326. 

Selected Publications

“American Game Studies,” co-edited with Patrick Jagoda. American Literature, no. 1 (Apr 2022).

“Tumblr’s Gallery of Loops: GIF Art Beyond Reaction GIF Culture,” A Tumblr Book: Platforms and Culture. University of Michigan Press, 2020.

Dying in Full Detail: Mortality and Digital Documentary. Duke University Press, 2017.

Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games (co-edited with TreaAndrea M. Russworm). Indiana University Press, 2017.

“Streaming Death: The Politics of Dying on YouTube.” Jump Cut, 2012.