Matthew I. Thompson

Dr. Matthew I. Thompson is interested in exploring how media influence our perceptions of and assumptions about nonhuman nature. As an assistant professor in the Film Department at the University of Regina, Matthew teaches courses like “Ecological Film and Media” and “Food on Film.” Before coming to Regina, Matthew was a sessional assistant professor at York University, where he taught in the Cinema and Media Arts program. He earned his PhD from the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto.

Matthew’s book, On Life Support: Eco-Dystopian Cinema in the Long 1970s (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), investigates how the environmental politics of the 1960s found themselves expressed in the dystopian science fiction films of the following decade. On Life Support argues that films like Silent Running and Soylent Green, which turned the doomsday rhetoric of environmentalists into hypothetical futures, demonstrate many of the problematic assumptions that underlie ecological rhetoric. Other areas of interest include Indigenous futurism, critical animal studies, artificial intelligence, and film philosophy. Matthew has published in the journals Spectator, World Picture, and The New Review of Film and Television Studies.