Soraya Murray’s forthcoming Technothriller: Film and the American Imagination (MIT, 2026) is the first dedicated examination of popular movies classified as “thrillers” that channel societal anxiety or dread about advanced technologies like supercomputers, robotics, AI, biotech, military weaponry, and digital surveillance. Technothriller is about the changing imagination of technology within an American context and its role in engineering some of the most profound ideologies of modern life. Murray considers beloved but often underrated films from the 1970s to the present, like The Andromeda Strain (1971), Westworld (1973), Rollerball (1975), Demon Seed (1977), WarGames (1983), The Hunt for Red October (1990), Jurassic Park (1993), Clear and Present Danger (1994), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the Mission:Impossible franchise (1996- ), Ex Machina (2014), Tenet (2020), M3GAN (2022), and The Creator (2023) to think through deeply embedded popular beliefs about technology, innovation, and their imaginaries—in other words, the mechanics of power within our technological lives. In short, Technothriller is about the troubled, sometimes catastrophic relationships between humans and their innovations.

Soraya Murray (PhD Cornell) studies contemporary visual culture, especially film and video games. She is an Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Murray’s first book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B. Tauris, 2018, paperback Bloomsbury 2021), considers video games from a visual culture perspective and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes and even complex struggles for recognition. Murray is currently co-editing an anthology with media and games scholar TreaAndrea Russworm on antiracist futures in games and play, and will soon publish her second single-author book, Technothriller.

Spring 2025 COLLOQUIUM SERIES

THE CENTER FOR CULTURAL STUDIES hosts a weekly Wednesday colloquium featuring work-in-progress by faculty & visitors. We are pleased to announce our Spring 2025 Series. Sessions begin promptly at 12:15 PM and end at 1:30 PM (PST) in Humanities Building 1, Room 210.

Staff assistance is provided by The Humanities Institute.