“Cipa gracefully moves between genres, films, and television series, showing a patient focus on fine details” — Shawn Loht, Philosophy in Review (2025)
“...its themes are ideas so universal, and so deep, that it has a fair chance of finding an audience among nonspecialists. All it really requires of the reader is a love of film and television” — Bill Rothman, University of Miami
“...a very rewarding read. Cipa stretches our understanding and renews our appetite for thinking about cinema and television.” — Daniel Varndell, University of Winchester
His scholarship works at the intersection of film and television studies and aesthetics, phenomenology, and hermeneutics to examine his fundamental interest in the value and challenges of close and careful attention to works of art. He is perennially preoccupied with the phenomenally rich features of embodied aesthetic experiences, the riddles of criticism as a translation of such experience, and the ways sustained engagement with and contemplation of different artworks gives life to a range of philosophical ideas and questions.
He is the author of Is Harpo Free? And Other Questions of the Metaphysical Screen (SUNY Press, 2024), editor of Who Do You Think I Am? Amnesia and Personal Identity in Film and Television (SUNY Press, forthcoming), and author of a second monograph, Habeas Corpus: Bodies and Embodiment in the Films of David Cronenberg, under contract with SUNY Press. His writing has appeared in the journals Senses of Cinema and Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions. His work appears in edited collections published by Edinburgh University Press, University of Texas Press, and Rutgers University Press amongst others.
Who Do You Think I Am?: Amnesia and Personal Identity in Film and Television. SUNY Press, “Horizons of Cinema” series. Forthcoming.
“Cinematic Stories and Experiences of Guilt: Representing Moral Emotions, Transferring Moral Understanding.” Passion: Journal of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions. Forthcoming.
“A Necessary Adventure: Child Explorers and the Senses of Adventure” in Adventure! Danger! Romance!: Essays on Explorers and Exploration on Screen, edited by Cynthia Miller and Sue Matheson. Edinburgh University Press, 2026.
“Beyond the Personal: History, Culture, and Empathy in Mystery Road (2016 & 2018)” In Television and Empathy, edited by Michael Samuel and Theresa Trimmel. Palgrave Macmillan, 2026.
“Comedic Film Criticism, Filmed: Mel Brooks’ Love of Cinema in The Critic (1963) and Silent Movie (1976)” In Mel Brooks: Critical Essays, edited by Sue Matheson. McFarland Books. 2025.
“A Friend out of an Enemy: Screen Space and the Traversal of Socio-cultural Boundaries in A Majority of One (1961).” Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Murray Pomerance. Rutgers University Press, 2025.
Is Harpo Free? and Other Questions of the Metaphysical Screen. SUNY Press, “Horizons of Cinema” series. 2024.
“A Tale of Two Donkeys: Transcendental Style and Creaturely Experience in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) and EO (2022).” Senses of Cinema, Special Issue on “Film and the Nonhuman,” edited by Cristóbal Escobar & Barbara Creed. 2024. Link.
“Ferrara’s Polarising Critical Reception: Clarity, Coherence, and Incongruity.” In ReFocus: The Films of Abel Ferrara, edited by Florian Zappe. Edinburgh University Press, 2024. With Ted Nannicelli and Joel Fantini.
“The Role of Philosophy in Schiller’s Prose.” The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, edited by Antonio Falduto and Tim Mehigan. Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
“Jackass Forever.” Australasian Journal of American Studies, vol. 42, no. 1, July 2023, 74-78. Link.
Book Reviews
“Noël Carroll and Film: A Philosophy of Art and Popular Culture,” by Mario Slugan. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, vol. 14, no. 3, Winter 2020, pp. 110-115.
“Embodied Cognition and Cinema,” edited by Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, vol. 10, no. 2, Winter 2016, pp. 149-155.
It is well-known that David Cronenberg’s films possess a perennial interest in the body. But what is the nature of this interest? And if the great director cares so much about the human body, why do consistently terrible things happen to them across his films? Why does he subject the body to torture, deformation, decay, erosion, and fusion with the non-human?
Habeas Corpus considers the ways in which the human body is the locus of meaning-making in the cinema of David Cronenberg. In Cronenberg’s films, we often see bodily deformation develop as a result of the way in which the body is experimented upon, taken advantage of, and exploited by other systems of knowledge, such as science, medicine, and psychotherapy. Moreover, his films have a preoccupation with the notion that our bodies and our embodied experiences are the primary means by which we interpret and make sense of the world. This brings the erotic, aesthetic, intellectual, and hermeneutic domains of human existence and experience into contact with each other.
Who Do You Think I Am?: Amnesia and Personal Identity in Film and Television
In an age preoccupied with identity politics and multiple forms of personal identification, where we curate our self-image through social media and publicise those attributes which define us, it seems unthinkable that at any point we would question or suffer doubts over who we are. Yet across film and television there is a figure who experiences and embodies these very struggles: that of the amnesiac.
Who Do You Think I Am? focuses on the amnesiac – meant in an inclusive way to refer to characters in films and television programs suffering from memory loss at any point – as a way of uniquely exploring memory and personal identity in film and television. Through an absence of reliable memories and a capacity to recollect, amnesiacs across film and television offer a novel and compelling way of illuminating the experience of remembering, memory as it relates to character development and storytelling, and the ways in which memory affords an understanding of ourselves and the world. The contributions draw on a range of perspectives and approaches, including phenomenology, close analysis of films and TV programs, cultural studies, aesthetics, and history to consider the place of music, narrative, spectatorship, authorship, and style in depicting and experiencing amnesia and the range of questions it encourages us to consider.
“Schiller and Austen, Aesthetic Education and Sense and Sensibility.” Seminar, School of Languages and Cultures, University of Queensland. 20 October 2023. Hybrid
With Prof. Jason Jacobs. “Spaces of Ruin in The Banshees of Inisherin.” Seminar, School of Communication and Arts, University of Queensland. 13 October 2023. Hybrid.
“Collaboration, Mise-en-scenè, Emotion, and Mood: The Artistic Legacy of The Manchurian Candidate” at The Manchurian Candidate @ 60 Seminar, 19th and 20th September 2022. Online
“More Than Time: Television Space and A Sense of Community” at Critical Studies in Television Conference, 4th July 2022. Online.
“Unwearied by Age: Identifying Timelessness in Film and Television” at Film and Philosophy Workshop, 10th June 2022. Online.
“Representing Qualia through Film Style and Narrative” at SCSMI Conference, 9th-12th June 2021, Online.
“Rethinking the Relation Between Film and Philosophy” at SSAAANZ Conference, “The Uses of Cinema: Film, TV, Screen Media” 21st-23rd November 2018, Monash University, Melbourne.
“The Experience of Eudaimonia and Love in Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder” at “Cinematic Imagination, Emotion and Ethical Criticism” Symposium, Thursday 9th November 2017, The University of Queensland.
(A former students writes...)
Courses Taught
MSTU1001: Introduction to Film and TV Studies
MSTU2005: Film Movements & Genres
MSTU2006: Australian Film and TV
MSTU2008: TV in the Age of Streaming
MSTU2160: Film and Television History
MSTU3012: Independent Media Studies
MSTU3150: Advanced Film and TV Criticism
“The Real Reason Stranger Things is so Popular.” Contact Magazine. 2025. Link.
“The burden of legacy: Why ‘The Godfather, Part II” still resonates with us after half-a-century.” ABC Religion & Ethics. 2024. Link.
“Savoring the Artistry of Film and TV.” SUNY Press Blog. 2024. Link.
Appearances
“The Godfather, Part II” – a parable of corruption and fall. Appearance on The Minefield with Scott Stephens and Waleed Aly. ABC Radio National. 2024. Link.
Last Updated 30.06.2026