About

I am a Ph.D. Student in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I am beginning research on a dissertation entitled “Perception and Playthings: Optical Toys as Instruments of Science and Culture.” My dissertation studies late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century optical toys to articulate their roles in normalizing and perpetuating particular modes of visual and sensory engagement. Synthesizing work in the history of science and psychology, theories of childhood, and film and media historiography, this dissertation challenges the assumption that optical toys were merely instrumental developments culminating in the invention of cinema, instead characterizing their use as a set of disjunctive media practices. In their various iterations as scientific instruments, educational toys, and public entertainments, the modes of engagement fostered by these toys have endured in their original forms. I argue that specific sensory paradigms are embedded within these devices, and have played a role in training children to apprehend the world in a particular way. Such an in-depth treatment of optical toys revises much existing film and media scholarship by foregrounding their role in reorganizing visual perception in developmental terms.