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Last updated 18th April 2024

Melbye earned his doctorate in Cinema and Television from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. He has published two monographs, Irony in The Twilight Zone and Landscape Allegory in Cinema. Melbye has also produced music for popular television shows including Friday Night Lights, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and One Life to Live.

He is currently functioning as a UKRI/Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Music and Design Arts at the University of Huddersfield. His fellowship project is entitled “Crime-Jazz Diasporas: African American Music in Overseas Cinema.”

He is also a US Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow.

My current fellowship and book project, Crime-Jazz Diasporas: African American Music in Overseas Cinema, explores a particular cultural impact of American mainstream media on British, European (French, Polish, Italian), and Japanese cinemas. Global dissemination of American popular music alongside pervasive distribution of 1940s and 50s crime dramas, among other genres, encouraged prejudicial association between jazz and social deviance in the form of sexual indulgence, criminality, ethnic otherness, or configurations of each reflecting the others. At the same time, African American and other visionaries were pushing the jazz idiom in bold new directions according to their own artistic ambitions. I argue that these progressive musical values were exploited in jazz-inflected film scores to reinforce traumatic narrative contexts across the 1960s—as visceral iterations of 'horror jazz.' Ironically, this cinematic trend toward disturbing psychological evocations of otherness represented a professional opportunity for modern jazz innovators, including African Americans. My work fosters a more nuanced understanding of cultural ambivalence toward these films in ways both transnational and idiosyncratic.

Research on jazz in American cinema has focused on its cultural correspondence to issues of race and the white mainstream perception of otherness as inherent to African Americans. The transnational aspect of my project advances a broader perspective on the complex media-manufacture of cultural identity in terms of ethnic otherness. Xenophobic visual evocations of African blackness were amplified by jazz on a global scale, even where no Black musicians or characters are visible. The perception of ethnic negritude per se should be understood as a multisensorial media contrivance requiring further study. So far, two preliminary articles are on track for publication in Music and the Moving Image and Music, Sound, and the Moving Image. Also among the project’s deliverables are a series of video essays, a website, and a symposium on “Film, Popular Music, and Identity.” I have also presented my work at several conferences including, most recently, Music and the Moving Image (New York), the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (Newcastle), the Royal Musical Association (London), and Music Since 1900 (Belgium). During Black History Month, a blog about my project will appear on the Cinema and Social Justice Project website. In February, I am scheduled to present in public at the BFI Reuben Library in London.

A primary responsibility at the University of Tyumen in Russia, where I was Head of Film and Media Studies, was the formation of interdisciplinary research teams and design projects for journal publication, grant support, and conference participation. I worked with an international group of collaborators including history, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience researchers on the project “Unnaturally Human: Enhancement and Manipulation of Human Capacity to Perceive and Perform,” which understands motion picture media in the greater context as synthetic inputs organized toward a therapeutic consequence. My contribution, “Modernist Embodiment: Sisyphean Landscape Allegory in Cinema,” is published in the interdisciplinary journal Screen Bodies (2021).

My book Irony in The Twilight Zone (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) explores the thematic use of irony in the original Twilight Zone anthology series and similar television shows, with reference to concurrent Cold War science fiction films and literature. My work here historicizes methods of social critique according to irony’s philosophical groundings in Schlegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Richard Rorty according to his “ironist utopia.” Embarking from this trajectory, I argue the series functions as an aggregate system of ironic communication, whose metaphysical moral universe mobilizes a critique of 1950s America’s characteristic fears and weaknesses. The study is peer-reviewed favorably in the Journal of American Culture and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

My book Landscape Allegory in Cinema (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) explores the topic of landscape in avant-garde and mainstream cinema from the silent era to the present. I identify cases where natural settings transcend their conventional roles as backdrop and become outward manifestations of inner subjective states. This study examines the critical history of landscape depiction in literature, painting, and photography, from medieval allegories like Roman de la Rose to the European Sublime, and from the American Hudson River School and Poe’s landscape sketches to Steichen’s Pictorialism. I trace these trajectories of influence to the presence of psychological landscapes in films of the 1960s and 1970s such as Lawrence of Arabia, Zabriskie Point, and Picnic at Hanging Rock. The book was nominated for Theatre Library Association’s Wall Award and is peer-reviewed favorably in Film & History.

My greater research agenda is to expand on my past investigations while forging new directions in untried contexts and disciplines. In maintaining currency with my work on The Twilight Zone and its legacy, I contributed a chapter on the recent revival series to the volume The Many Lives of The Twilight Zone: Essays on the Television and Film Franchise (McFarland, 2022). Toward expanding my research on landscape in film, and in non-Western contexts, I am editor for the new volume Global Cinema Studies in Landscape Allegory (Lexington/Bloomsbury, 2024), an extension of my first book inviting scholars to contribute to this underexplored area of film studies. I contributed “Sisyphus on Horseback: Landscape Allegory in the Postwar Western” to the European Journal of American Culture as well as “Psychological Landscape Films: Narrative and Stylistic Approaches” to the peer-reviewed Portuguese journal Aniki. I also contributed an article on the landscape-oriented film Seopyeonje to the South Korean cinema magazine Anno. My new role as an editor for Film International (Intellect) also provides me with a powerful means to globalize my academic interests by drawing attention to the Global South as well as other underrepresented regions and cultural contexts. 

Although my extensive teaching record comprises mostly film and media studies courses, I also teach preproduction, production, and postproduction courses and skills in diverse overseas environments.