Mihaela Mihailova / University of Michigan

Mihaela Mihailova is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, with a joint appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Media. She has published articles in animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, and Kino Kultura. She has also contributed chapters to Animating Film Theory (ed. Karen Beckman) (co-written with John MacKay), Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function (ed. Chris Pallant), The Animation Studies Reader (eds. Bella Honess Roe, Nichola Dobson, Amy Ratelle, and Caroline Ruddell), and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema (eds. Jonathan Murray and Nea Ehrlich).  Dr. Mihailova is currently working on a book manuscript, Animating Global Realities in the Digital Age. Through a comparative analysis of contemporary studio animation and visual effects produced in the United States and Russia, the project examines how animated media’s relationship to reality articulates national ideologies in the era of digital globalization. She is also editing a collection of essays titled Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft for Bloomsbury Publishing.