Finley Freibert | SIU

Media Studies

Farrah Freibert (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies whose research spans industry studies, film and media history, global horror cinema, digital cultures, and LGBTQ+ cultural history. Her film and media studies work has appeared in peer-reviewed scholarly venues such as Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies (Duke University), Film Criticism (University of Michigan), JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (University of Michigan), Journal of Anime and Manga Studies (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), the Journal of Homosexuality (Routledge), Monstrum (McGill University), Porn Studies (Routledge), Spectator (University of Southern California), Synoptique (Concordia University, Montréal), Transatlantica: Revue d’études Américaines (Aix-Marseille University and University of Avignon), Velvet Light Trap (University of Texas Press), and Flow: A Critical Forum on Media and Culture (University of Texas at Austin). Also, she is coeditor of Refocus: The Films of Doris Wishman (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and Screening Adult Cinema (Routledge, 2025).

In addition to contributing chapters to books on under-researched film directors including Jesús Franco and Roberta Findlay, Dr. Freibert has also written columns for two of the oldest American LGBT news outlets, the Advocate and the Washington Blade, and for the popular magazine The Gay & Lesbian Review. Her applied mathematics work on digital communications has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Information Theory and Advances in Mathematics of Communications. Broadly, Dr. Freibert’s research tracks how communitarian cultural productions (such as feminist and LGBT media) have been tied to commercial structures, and how such media exist in a complex relationship with economic and cultural systems of regulation. Her monograph, Nothing Censored, Nothing Gained: Obscenity Law and Histories of Queer Distribution and Exhibition (Edinburgh University Press) and estimated to be published in late 2025.