Dennis Turner Memorial Lecture
Dr. Robin Means Coleman
Black Horror, Uncivil Disobedience, and Reclaiming the Urban
September 29, 2023
Presented by Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman, author of Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (Routledge, 2011).
Elena Gorfinkel
Walking Still: Vulnerable Endurance in Tsai Ming Liang's Walker Series
April 22, 2016
Elena Gorfinkel is an associate professor in the Department of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. Her work focuses on film history, global art cinema and film criticism. She is the author of Sensational Bodies: American Sexploitation Cinema's Scenes of Looking, 1959-1972 (University of Minnesota Press). Gorfinkel has also been published in numerous film journals including Screen and Camera Obscura.
The lecture, "Walking Still: Vulnerable Endurance in Tsai Ming Liang's Walker Series," is part of an exciting project on slowness, stillness and endurance in contemporary global cinema. Tsai's "Walker" is an astonishing piece of slow filmmaking from one of the masters of contemporary global art cinema.
Alexis Lothian
Queer Speculative Imaginaries and the History of the Future
December 11, 2015
Alexis Lothian is assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies and Core Faculty in the Design Cultures & Creativity Honors Program at University of Maryland College Park. Her work focuses on the intersections of digital media, speculative fiction and social justice movements. She has published in venues that include International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Social Text Periscope, Journal of Digital Humanities, and Extrapolation, the feminist science fiction publisher Aqueduct Press, and Ada: a Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, for which she edited a 2013 special issue on feminist science fiction. She is a founding member of the editorial team of the open access fan studies journal Transformative Works and Cultures, a founding member of the #transformDH collective and co-chairs the academic track at the feminist science fiction convention WisCon.
Linda Williams
On the Wire
April 17, 2015
Linda Williams is professor of film and media studies and Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley."¨She is one of the most important working film scholars. She is the author of a great many articles and books across a widely varying array of topics in cinema and media studies, including Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J., and, most recently, On The Wire.
Anna Everett
The Persistence and Extension of Black Film in the Digital Millennium
April 11, 2014
Dr. Anna Everett, is a professor of film, television and new media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Everett is a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award (2005, 2007), among other honors. Her many publications include the books Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949; Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media (for the MacArthur Foundation's series on Digital Media, Youth, and Learning), New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide, Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, and Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s. She is finishing a new book on President Obama, social media culture and the Where U @ Generation.
N. Katherine Hayles
Speculative Realism and Speculative Finance: Exploring the Connections
April 5, 2013
N. Katherine Hayles is professor of literature at Duke University, and is the author of How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics and My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Her most recent book, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis argues for, and provides a framework for, the unification of two humanistic fields of study that are shockingly disparate: media theory and digital humanities. How We Think leads us to re-imagine not only how we think about computers, but how we use them to think.
Patricia MacCormack
Angelic Monsters, Movement in Mucous
October 24, 2012
Patricia MacCormack is eader in english, communication, film and media aat Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. She has published extensively on Guattari, Blanchot, Serres, Irigaray, queer theory, teratology, body modification, posthuman theory, animal rights and horror film. Her work includes Inhuman Ecstasy (Angelaki), Becoming-Vulva (New Formations) The Great Ephemeral Tattooed Skin (Body and Society) Necrosexuality (Queering the Non/Human) Unnatural Alliances (Deleuze and Queer Theory) Vitalistic FeminEthics (Deleuze and Law) and Cinemasochism: Time, Space and Submission (The Afterimage of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy). She is the author of Cinesexuality and the co-editor of The Schizoanalysis of Cinema. She is currently writing on post-human ethics. She has also worked as a consultant in a number of art projects on feminism and queer theory and has appeared interviewed and as commentator on many DVD extras.
Vivian Sobchack
The Dream (Ol) Factory: On Making Scents of Cinema
October 16, 2011
Vivian Sobchack was the first woman elected president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and is on the board of directors of the American Film Institute. Her essays have appeared in journals such as "Quarterly Review of Film and Video," "Film Comment," "camera obscura," "Film Quarterly" and "Representations." Her books include Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience; and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture and she has edited two anthologies: Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change; and The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event. Her research interests are eclectic: American film genres, philosophy and film theory, history and phenomenology of perception, historiography and cultural studies. Vivian Sobchack teaches at the UCLA School of Theater, Film And Television.
D. N. Rodowick
A Compass in a Moving World (on genres and genealogies of theory)
October 29, 2010
D. N. Rodowick is the William R. Kenan, Jr. professor of visual and environmental studies and chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.
Rodowick is the author of numerous essays as well as five books: The Virtual Life of Film (2007); Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (2001); Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (1997); The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory (1991); and The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (1989). His talk will included material from his forthcoming book An Elegy for Theory.
Garrett Stewart
Cinema's Digital Turn
October 30, 2009
Given by Professor Garrett Stewart, the James O. Freedman Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. The lecture itself consisted of a series of clips from various films, classic and recent, accompanied by Garrett Stewart's commentary.
Jon Lewis
Real Sex: The Aesthetics and Economics of Art house Porn
April 10, 2008
Given by Dr. Jon Lewis, a professor of film at Oregon State University and a renowned specialist in contemporary American cinema and media studies. His talk was on non-simulated sex in art house cinema and discussed recent films like John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus, Catherine Breillat's Romance, and Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny. There was a large student and faculty turnout, who were intrigued by the provocative subject. The representation of sex and sexuality in cinema has been a growing field in film studies, and Dr. Lewis' talk was an opportunity for our students to hear about this scholarship. Dr Lewis is the author of 7 books, including Whom God Wishes to Ruin. Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood and Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry. He has also appeared as an academic commentator in two recent documentaries on respectively, the sex industry, and censorship: Inside Deep Throat (Fenton Baily, 2005) and This Film is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick, 2006).
Gaylyn Studlar
Raucous Women and Wily Children: Age and Fads of Femininity in Classical Hollywood
2007
Gaylan Studlar is the Rudolf Arnheim Collegiate professor of film studies at the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Gaylyn Studlar is the author of numerous books including Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, co-edited with Kevin J. Sandler, Rutgers University Press, (1999), Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience, co-edited with David Desser, Smithsonian Institution Press (1993), In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic, Columbia UP, Morningside Edition, (1992); U of Illinois Press, (1988). Her current book project is Precocious Charms: Juvenated Femininity in Classical Hollywood Stardom (contracted with University of California Press for submission in 2007).
Jacqueline Stewart
2006
Associate professor of English, Cinema & Media Studies, African & African American Studies University of Chicago. Author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, University of California Press.
The works of prolific African American filmmaker Spencer Williams have not received much critical attention, in large part because they seem to display the same "bad" stylistic qualities ascribed to early Black films in general. Looking at Williams' religious dramas, including The Blood of Jesus (1941), this talk explores the issue of style in "race movies," exploring the complex ways they construct spaces (e.g., urban and rural, secular and sacred) to situate their stories and their audiences on the eve of an integrationist era.
Donald Crafton
2004