By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate In 2020, Pamela Robertson Wojcik (Ph.D. 1993) not only has received a Guggenheim Fellowship along with the University of Notre Dame Sheedy Excellence in Teaching Award—she also has published her book Gidget: Origins of a Teen Girl Transmedia Franchise and is releasing a co-edited collection in March 2021. […]
By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate Shekinah Thornton, department assistant for both Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Civilizations, began working at UChicago in June 2019. She enjoys seeing the wide range of faculty and student research and events across two very different departments. Thornton handles many technical, behind-the-scenes procedures for […]
By Amy Skjerseth Avery LaFlamme, currently a third year PhD student in CMS, also received his bachelor’s degree from UChicago. He started by studying Political Science, and then, after his advisor suggested that he take some film courses, majored in Cinema and Media Studies as well. “I started to take courses that were cross-listed in […]
By Amy Skjerseth Currently the William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the Departments of Romance Languages and Literatures and Cinema and Media Studies, Rebecca West began teaching at UChicago in 1973, long before courses or university spaces were devoted to the study of cinema. “That cinema could be the object of serious […]
By Amy Skjerseth Marc Downie wears a number of hats. He’s a lecturer in Cinema and Media Studies and in Media Arts and Design. He’s a world-renowned artist—part of OpenEndedGroup, along with collaborator Paul Kaiser—who has had commissions from the Centre Pompidou, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and other institutions, and has worked with such […]
By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate If you attended Film Studies Center events over the past four years, you likely saw Elizabeth Myles (BA, ’20) filming artist talks and running screenings. “When projecting for CMS courses, I loved to see what they screened,” Myles reflects, “like James Rosenow’s pairing of Daisies and Clueless for Intro to Film.” But […]
By Jennifer Wild It is with profound sorrow that the Department of Cinema and Media Studies mourns the passing of Robert Bird on September 7, 2020 after a nine-month battle with colon cancer. Even before joining the department as a full faculty member in 2012, Robert would regularly cross-list his classes with CMS, including “Narratives […]
By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate As the first official Ph.D. graduate of CMS, Allison Whitney recalls the excitement of a university film culture that involved the broader Chicago community. “One of the things that was so crucial to my education,” Whitney remembers, “was the presence of the Film Studies Center and Doc Films. […]
By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate Pao-chen Tang, a film scholar with a focus in East Asia and media environmental studies, can attest to what it’s like to start an academic job during a pandemic. This fall, he began a position as Lecturer (equiv. Assistant Professor) in Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of […]
By Amy Skjerseth / CMS PhD Candidate For K.L. Sanders, Summer 2020 has yielded many potential case studies for her work on digital culture. In July, she attended Northwestern University’s Summer Institute in Rhetoric and Public Culture: Media Aesthetics II, an intensive, five-day event held entirely online. The theme was “Scenes of the Screen,” apt […]