Kirsten Moana Thompson (born 1964) is an interdisciplinary scholar of American and New Zealand/Pacific cinema and visual culture.
[7] Thompson's training in history, literature and media has shaped her interdisciplinary research and teaching.
Thompson's first sole authored book, Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium, examined a series of films made in the late nineties and first decade of the new century through Søren Kierkegaard's concept of dread, situating millennial cinema in philosophical, theological and cinematic traditions of anxieties about the future.
[9][10] Through her readings of certain films like Cape Fear (Martin Scorsese, 1991) and Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992), Thompson offered new philosophical explanations for the long-standing cultural popularity of horror and apocalyptic cinema.
Reflecting her increasing interest in wider social and historical aspects of visual culture, her work considers the emergence of visual technologies of identification and corporeal mapping, linking them to policing, social control, and the emergence of modern identity.