Benjamin Mier-Cruz
UW–Madison Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity Resident Fellow (2025–2026)
Assistant Professor, German, Nordic, and Slavic+; Gender & Women’s Studies, UW–Madison
Documenting Embodied Fictions
Rooted in a long history of ethnographic filmmaking that once turned the camera outward to study the “other,” Sweden has often imagined itself as the objective observer, not the observed. What happens when filmmakers of color turn the ethnographic camera back on Sweden itself? This project explores how contemporary Swedish short films reimagine reenactment and docufiction to expose the labor of making race visible within a culture that claims not to see it. Through creative interventions in the documentary form, these filmmakers expose the everyday textures of racialization within Sweden’s culture of colorblindness and imagine new ways of seeing—and feeling—race on screen.
Benjamin Mier-Cruz is an Assistant Professor of Scandinavian Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies. Their research focuses on filmmakers of color in Nordic cinema, and they teach courses on queer and transgender cinema as well as vampire literature and film. Their first book, on Swedish documentary filmmaking and visual activism, is forthcoming, and they are co-editing a special issue of Scandinavian Studies on AfroNordic feminisms. Their next book project explores queer, trans, and Black undead ontologies in vampire cinema. They also specialize in Finland-Swedish modernist poetry.
*Events currently open only to 2025-26 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*