Dennis Turner Memorial Lecture
Dr. Robin Means Coleman
Black Horror, Uncivil Disobedience and Reclaiming the Urban
September 29, 2023
Dr. Robin R. Means Coleman is vice president and associate provost for institutional diversity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, and the Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. She implements diversity accountability processes by working collaboratively with Northwestern’s 12 schools and colleges on three campuses. An award-winning scholar, Dr. Coleman’s research focuses on media studies and the cultural politics of Blackness. Dr. Coleman is the author of "Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present" (2023); "Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present" (2011); and "African-American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor" (2000). She is co-author of "The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror from Fodder to Oscar" (2023) and "Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life" (2014). She is the editor of "Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity" (2002) and co-editor of "Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader" (2008). She is also the author of a number of other academic and popular publications. Additionally, Dr. Coleman is featured in and co-executive produced, the critically acclaimed, award-winning documentary film "Horror Noire." The film features a ‘who’s who’ cast, including: Jordan Peele (Get Out), Tananarive Due (My Soul to Keep), Ashlee Blackwell (graveyardshiftsisters.com), William Crain (Blacula), Rusty Cundieff (Tales from the Hood), Rachel True (The Craft), Ernest Dickerson (The Walking Dead), Keith David (The Thing), Mark Harris (blackhorrormovies.com) and a host of other horror stars and experts.
This talk explores Black horror’s (“horror noire’s”) response to the quest for social justice through the long civil rights movement. Informed by Delmas’ (2018) conceptualization of “uncivil disobedience,” Dr. Means Coleman asks the challenging questions, ‘What are the limits of activism?’ and ‘What does it mean for Black horror and for us, its audience, to reject more respectable, civil approaches to disobedience to secure social justice’? She details how Black horror makes the case for liberation through the annihilation of oppressors, a kind of The First Purge (2018), but in reverse, motivated by the destruction of anti-Blackness. To answer these questions, she focuses her analysis on Jordan Peele’s "Get Out" (2017), Jamaa Fanaka’s "Soul Vengeance" (1975) and Nia DaCosta’s "Candyman" (2021).
Conversations with Scholars and Authors
September 2021
This series of conversations features prominent scholars Marita Sturken, Benjamin Han, Julian Chambliss and Dan Hassler-Forest (also the DeRoy Lecture).
Shelley Streeby
Speculative Archives: Hidden Histories and Ecologies of Science Fiction World-Making
September 2020
Dr. Shelley Streeby is a Professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego.
This talk gets its title from the title of Dr. Streeby’s new book called "Speculative Archives: Hidden Histories and Ecologies of Science Fiction World-Making," which builds off her archival research into the Octavia E. Butler Papers, which are housed at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. In particular, Dr. Streeby explores the future-facing memory work done by female science fiction writers in their research.
Kristina Busse
Framing Fan Fiction: Archival Infrastructures as Consent Negotiations
February 2017
Dr. Kristina Busse currently teaches in the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Alabama. Her primary research is on fan fiction and fan cultures and her work has appeared in various collections and journals, including "Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, and Popular Communication." She has coedited "Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet " and "The Fan Fiction Studies Reader" with Karen Hellekson and "Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom" with Louisa Stein. Her essay collection is "Framing Fan Fiction: Literary and Social Practices in Fan Fiction Communities." She is currently coauthoring "Fan Fantasies and the Politics of Desire" with Alexis Lothian. Dr. Busse is the founding coeditor with Karen Hellekson of "Transformative Works and Cultures" (2008-22) and was on the Board of Directors for the "Organization for Transformative Works."
This talk looks at issues of consent both within and surrounding fan fiction. Looking at the various appeals of rape and non-con stories in particular, Dr. Busse discusses how fans themselves thematize their engagement with power abuse and sexual violence through stories and discussions. Fan spaces often follow an ethos where informed consent becomes central. In fact, archival infrastructures and fan-ish conventions enable consent negotiations between readers and writers: through these frameworks, writers offer readers the ability to affirmatively consent to read their stories and to expose themselves to the ideas and emotions the fan fiction may engender.
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," "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 a 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 several art projects on feminism and queer theory and has appeared interviewed and as a 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 seven 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