Rate My Professor Christian Long

Dr. Christian Long is a Senior Lecturer in the Media, Film and Communication programme at the University of Otago, where he commenced in July 2025. Originally from the United States, he earned a BA at Illinois State University, an MA at the University of New Hampshire, and a PhD at Vanderbilt University. Before entering higher education—prompted by nearly losing his left thumb at a structural steel fabrication plant—he worked in a multiplex cinema, a public library, and the steel plant. His diverse career encompasses teaching film and literature alongside student support at the University of Canterbury; instructing science and engineering PhD students, for whom English was an additional language, at Queensland University of Technology; serving as Visiting Professor of American Studies at the University of Vienna; and functioning as a bureaucrat in the graduate school at the University of Queensland while occasionally teaching American literature and film.

Christian Long specializes in Hollywood cinema, infrastructuralism, spatial analysis often involving mapping and data visualisation, dystopian and post-apocalyptic film, and bureaucracy. His major publications include the monographs The Imaginary Geography of Hollywood Cinema, 1960-2000 (2017) and Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021 (2024). He edited ReFocus: The Films of Albert Brooks (2021) and co-edited Film and the American Presidency (2015) with Jeff Menne. Key articles and chapters feature 'Police, Adjective (2009), malicious compliance, and the potential of a good cop' (Jump Cut, 2025), 'The infrastructure of the Planets of the Apes' (2024), 'The Lone Gunmen who came in from the fringe' (Contingent, 2023), 'Running Out of Gas: The Energy Crisis in 1970s Suburban Narratives' (2011), and 'Chase Sequences and Transport Infrastructure in Global Hollywood Spy Films' (2016). Over his teaching career, he has covered Hollywood cinema, genre cinema, global cinema, film theory, documentary film, Shakespeare on film, utopian and dystopian film, American Studies, 20th-century American literature, and 19th-century American literature. At Otago, he convenes MFCO319 Contemporary American Cinema, MFCO301 Critical Problems in Film and Media, and MFCO210 Theory of Film and Media. In 2026, he will be a Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Amsterdam, advancing his project on the geographical imagination in late-20th and early-21st-century American spy fiction and films.