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Brian R. Jacobson

Professor of Visual Culture
B.S., Appalachian State University, 2002; M.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2005; Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2011. Caltech, 2020-.

Profile

Brian Jacobson is a historian of modern visual culture and media and their intersections with histories of science and technology. His research focuses on world making and the creation of artificial environments, from media architecture and visual representation to energy infrastructure, climate control, and terraforming.

Jacobson has written extensively about the history of media architecture. His first book, Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia University Press, 2015), situates the world's first film studios in the architectural and technological developments of urban industrial modernity and argues that cinema should be understood both as a system of environmental regulation and as a critical component of what historians of technology have termed the "human-built world." Jacobson is the editor of the multi-award-winning book In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020), a volume that examines film, television, art, and new media studios in a range of historical and geographic contexts.

His current research combines histories of energy and environment with art and film to examine the role visual culture plays in shaping the practices, politics, and cultural imaginaries of competing energy forms and environmental futures. This work includes two books. The first, The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and their Forms (Columbia University Press, 2025), expands recent work in materialist media history while developing a method for redirecting that work's insights to formal analysis. The second book, currently being finalized with the working title, "Art in an Age of Oil," investigates the intertwined midcentury revolutions in energy, media, and visual culture in France and its late-colonial and post-colonial empire. With Weihong Bao and James Leo Cahill, he edited "Media Climates," the Winter 2022 special issues of Representations.

Jacobson is a recipient of Fulbright, Social Science Research Council (US), Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Canada), Carnegie Trust, and other fellowships. He was a 2016–2017 fellow at the University of Rochester Humanities Center and a 2023-2024 fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Visual Culture. Before arriving at Caltech, he taught at the University of Toronto (2015–2020), the University of St. Andrews (2012–2015), and Oklahoma State University (2011–2012).

Research Summary
Visual Culture; Media History; Art History; History of Technology
Caltech Affiliations

Featured News

"Plugged In": Caltech and the Norton Simon Museum Collaborate to Explore Art and Electricity
October 23, 2024
An October symposium hosted by the Norton Simon Museum and Caltech focused on how artists have depicted and used electric light.
The Cinema of Big Oil
June 03, 2022
A conversation with Brian R. Jacobs, professor of visual culture in Caltech’s humanities and social sciences division, about his research into the trove of films oil and gas companies have made about themselves.
New Visual Culture Minor Available to Students
September 20, 2021
Visual culture minors will study media used in film, literature, history, art, and more.
Read more news

Selected Publications

Books

  • The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and their Forms (Columbia University Press, Film & Culture Series, 2025)
  • Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (New York: Columbia University Press, Film & Culture Series, 2015)
  • Art in an Age of Oil (manuscript in preparation)

Edited Books and Special Journal Issues

  • "Media Climates," Representations 157 (Winter 2022) (co-edited with Weihong Bao and James Leo Cahill)
  • In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020)

Articles

  • "Evil Does Not Exist: Downstream Environmental Form," Film Quarterly 78, no. 2 (forthcoming, 2024)
  • "French Cinema vs. The Bomb: Atomic Science and a War of Images circa 1950," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 42 (2), 191-218 (2022)
  • "Media Climates, an Introduction" (w/James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao), Representations 157 (Winter 2022), 1-16.
  • "Crude Designs for an Oil-Built World," Post45 (5 March 2021)
  • "The Shadow of Progress and the Cultural Markers of the Anthropocene," Environmental History 24, no. 1 (January 2019), 158-172.
  • "Fire and Failure: Studio Technology, Environmental Control, and the Politics of Progress," Cinema Journal 57.2 (Winter 2018), 22-43.
  • "Toward a History of French Ecocinema: Nature in Dimitri Kirsanoff's Modernity," Framework 58, no. 1-2 (Spring/Fall 2017), 52-66.
  • "Midcentury Rural Modern: French Agricultural Cinema and the Art of Persuasion," Screen 58(2) (Summer 2017), 141-162.
  • "Ex Machina in the Garden," Film Quarterly 69, no. 4 (Summer 2016), 23-34.
  • "Infrastructural Affinity: Film Technology and the Built Environment in New York circa 1900," Framework 57, No. 1 (Spring 2016), 7-31.
  • "Fantastic Functionality: Studio Architecture and the Visual Rhetoric of Early Hollywood," Film
  • History 26, no. 2 (2014), 52-81.
  • "Infrastructure and Intermediality: Network Archaeology at Gaumont's Cité Elgé," Amodern: A Journal on Media, Culture, and Poetics 2 (2013)
  • "The Black Maria: Film Studio, Film Technology (Cinema and the History of Technology)," History and
  • Technology 27.2 (2011), 233-241.
  • "The ‘imponderable fluidity' of modernity: Georges Méliès and the architectural origins of cinema,"
  • Early Popular Visual Culture 8, no. 2 (May 2010), 189-207.

Book Chapters

  • "Filming Atomic Energy in 1950s France," Routledge Handbook of Energy Humanities, eds. Janet Stewart and Graeme MacDonald (Routledge, forthcoming, 2026)
  • "On the Red Carpet in Rouen: Industrial Film Festivals and a World Community of Filmmakers," in Films that Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Cinema, eds. Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof, and Yvonne Zimmerman (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), 317-338.
  • "Corporate Authorship: French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry," in A Companion to Documentary Film History, ed. Joshua Malitsky (Wiley-Blackwell, 2021), 147-164.
  • "Industrial Film and the Politics of Visibility in the Early Years of North Sea Oil," in Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry, eds. Marina Dahlquist and Patrick Vonderau (London: Bloomsbury, 2021)
  • "Prospecting: Cinema and the Exploration of Extraction," in Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, eds. James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati (London: AFI/Routledge, 2021), 280-294.
  • "The Boss's Film: Expert Amateurs and Industrial Culture," in Amateur Movie Making: Aesthetics of the Everyday in New England Film, 1915-1960, eds. Martha J. McNamara and Karan Sheldon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 198-218.
  • "Found Memories of Film History: Industry in a Post-Industrial World; Cinema in a Post-Filmic Age," in New Silent Cinema, eds. Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo (New York: AFI/Routledge, 2015), 243-262.

Catalog Essays

  • "Golden Event Science in the Golden Age of Television," in Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920-2020, eds. Peter S. Collopy and Claudia Bohn-Spector (Caltech/Getty PST, 2024)
  • "Every World in One: Georges Méliès and the Film Studio," in City of Cinema, eds. Britt Salveson, Leah Lehmbeck, Vanessa R. Schwartz (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2022), 154-167.
  • "Le studio : toute l'image du monde," in Enfin le Cinéma! Exposition au Musée d'Orsay, eds. Dominique Paini, Paul Perrin, and Marie Robert (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2021), 262-267.

Book and Film Reviews

  • "Bifocal Historicity" [on Dearest Fiona (Fiona Tan, 2023)], Berlinale Forum (Berlin International Film Festival, 2023)
  • "Lousy Listing: On Sight & Sound and Taste," Los Angeles Review of Books (December 2022)
  • Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media. Noam M. Elcott. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59.1 (Fall 2019), 171-178.
  • "Hollywood in Flames," Los Angeles Review of Books (June 2019)
  • "Workers of the World Cup," Los Angeles Review of Books (July 2018)
  • "The Oil Stays in the Picture: The tar sands, and a war of images," Literary Review of Canada vol 26, no. 5 (June 2018)
  • "How the Oil Barrel Became an Economic Concept: An Object Lesson," The Atlantic (September 2017)
  • "Big Oil's High-Risk Love Affair with Film," Los Angeles Review of Books (April 2017)
  • The End of Cinema? A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age. André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion. Columbia University Press, 2015. Screen 57:4 (Winter 2016), 506-509.
  • Cinematic Appeals: The Experience of New Movie Technologies. Ariel Rogers. Columbia University Press, 2013. Technology and Culture 56, no. 2 (April 2015), 558-560.
  • The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources. Nadia Bozak. Rutgers University Press,
  • 2011. Technology and Culture 54, no. 2 (April 2013), 424-426.
  • Chromatic Cinema: A History of Screen Color. Richard Misek. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Technology and
  • Culture 53, no. 3 (July 2012), 715-717.
  • "Film Analysis After Film," Review of Framed Time: Towards a Postfilmic Cinema. Garrett Stewart.
  • University of Chicago Press, 2007. Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and
  • Culture 32.2 (2010).
2023-24
VC 130 – Surveillance
VC 131 – Visual Culture and the California Environment
Hum/VC 48 – Ways of Seeing
Hum/VC 51 – Icons and Iconoclasm
2021-22
VC 130 – Surveillance
VC 175 – The Art of Science
Hum/VC 48 – Ways of Seeing
Hum/VC 51 – Icons and Iconoclasm