Research Areas

Film and media theory; global art cinema (with a focus on French and francophone); gender and sexuality studies; cultural studies; contemporary media; critical theory; digital media studies.

Professor Young’s first book, Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies (Duke, 2018), explores how fears and fantasies about women’s and queer sexualities shaped film aesthetics in France and the US from the late 1950s through to the present. 

His current book project, “After the Private Self,” studies the way different media — from the written diary to Instagram — structure different forms of subjectivity. From the interiority accessed--or produced--through writing in Rousseau’s Confessions to the simultaneous hypertrophy and disappearance of the "self" in digital media culture, the project investigates the technological/media grounds of the modern and postmodern self.

Professor Young is a member of the Bully Bloggers collective. 

Read an interview in Film Quarterly here:
The Liberal Sexual Subject: A Conversation with Damon R. Young.

Selected Publications

Selected publications:

"Safe Spaces," Bullybloggers, pandemic edition, March 2020

“Teorema’s Death Drive,” forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema

"In Defense of Psychoanalytic Film Theory," forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory

“A Man with a Mother: Tarnation and the Subject of Confession,” in Thomas Waugh and Brandon Arroyo (eds.), I Confess: Constructing the Sexual Self in the Internet Age (2019)

“Ironies of Web 2.0” http://post45.research.yale.edu/2019/05/ironies-of-web-2-0/, in “How to be Now,” special issue of Post-45 (Summer 2019)

“Gag the Fag, or Tops and Bottoms, Persons and Things,” Porn Studies 4.2 (2017)

“Queer Love,” in Jennifer C. Nash (ed.), Gender: Love (2017)

“Visage/Con: Catherine Breillat and the Antinomies of Sex,” Qui Parle 24.2 (Spring/Summer 2016)

The Cultural Logic of Contemporary Capitalism, a special issue of the journal Social Text (June 2016), co-edited with Nico Baumbach and Genevieve Yue

As translator:

Jean-Luc Nancy, “Ode to José Esteban Muñoz,” Social Text 121; 32.4 (Winter 2014)