Nearly four decades after earning her first bachelor’s degree, Gail McFarland has returned to higher education through Georgia State University’s GSU-62 program. Before starting her doctoral studies, McFarland was a published author of contemporary African American romantic fiction and spent more than 20 years working for the federal government as a fitness specialist, educator, and program developer.
McFarland’s dissertation, titled “Location, Breaking Form: Black Standup and the Cinematic Black Social Cut,” examines a unique aesthetic tradition in Black film comedy. Her research explores how comedians such as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, and Tiffany Haddish use techniques like rupture, improvisation, call-and-response, signifyin(g), deadpan expression, and what she calls ratchetness to challenge traditional cinematic forms.
Discussing her motivation to pursue a Ph.D., McFarland said: “I returned to school at Georgia State University as an older student through the GSU-62 program, nearly 40 years after completing my first bachelor’s degree, and I was genuinely surprised by how much I loved it. In the years before returning, I was writing contemporary African American romantic fiction, publishing short stories and novels that centered Black women’s interior lives, intimacy, humor and desire. As I wrote, I found myself thinking cinematically, imagining what these characters would look like onscreen, how they would move through space, how their voices, silences and relationships might register visually and affectively. Those questions, about translation, representation and form, are what first led me to think seriously about film studies and ultimately about Georgia State.”
She described changes in academia since her initial college experience: “Once I arrived, I discovered that ‘school’ itself had changed in ways that felt expansive rather than restrictive. Classrooms were more dialogic, theory felt alive and contested, and film and cultural studies were finally engaging questions of race, power, performance and spectatorship in ways that were not available when I finished the first time. What began as curiosity quickly deepened into intellectual commitment.”
After completing a B.A. in Film and Media followed by an M.A. in Africana Studies with a focus on culture and aesthetics at Georgia State University (GSU), McFarland credits faculty mentors for encouraging her academic growth: “Faculty mentors urged me to continue writing and reading across film and cultural theory, and I realized that the questions I was asking… required the sustained time, rigor and depth that only doctoral study could provide.”
Reflecting on how the Ph.D. program shaped her as a researcher: “The Ph.D. program at GSU trained me to slow down, look closely and trust my analytical instincts while also re-forming language and demanding theoretical precision. I have learned how to build an argument across disciplines… The program encouraged methodological experimentation… That freedom has allowed me to think expansively about cinema not just as a medium but as a cultural practice shaped by performance…”
McFarland also noted how her prior professional experience informs her scholarship: “I came to academia after a long professional life outside academia… That experience shaped how I think about learning… Coming back to school later in life also meant I arrived with cultural memory. I lived through the eras I now study… That lived experience informs my scholarship…”
On the significance of her dissertation work she stated: “My dissertation… theorizes a distinct aesthetic and formal tradition in Black film comedy that emerges through rupture… This work matters to me personally because it takes Black comedy seriously as theory rather than just entertainment… The project is also an act of recovery…”
Looking ahead academically she plans “to continue studying and expanding the CBSC across examinations of film television digital performance particularly in relation to contemporary Black comedians…” Professionally she is focused on teaching mentoring nontraditional students; she founded The Film & Media Theory Navigator—an online platform aimed at making film/media theory accessible.
Georgia State University offers programs such as Communication Studies with concentrations like Moving Image Studies for those interested in fields similar to McFarland’s.
