Sebastian Wurzrainer

Pronouns: he/him

Email: wurzrain@usc.edu
Advisor: Priya Jaikumar

Sebastian Wurzrainer is a settler scholar and PhD candidate in cinema and media studies at The University of Southern California. He has received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in cinema and media studies from Dartmouth College and USC respectively. His research considers the fraught ways in which Hollywood films translate and refract the incommensurability between the sovereignty of the settler state and the sovereignty of Indigenous nations. He is particularly interested in how Indigenous actors, filmmakers, and spectators use recent works of Hollywood speculative fiction to assert and enact varied forms of Indigenous sovereignty. Sebastian is currently working on his dissertation, tentatively titled “Mediating Sovereignty: Hollywood Speculative Fiction and Narratives of Indigenous Survivance.” He has published reviews and articles in the Journal of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Spectator. He has also written chapters for the forthcoming anthologies Skoden, Stoodis! Critical and Creative Perspectives on Reservation Dogs and Handbook on the Global Civic Imagination.