Event

Timothy Corrigan's Retirement Symposium | Friday, 12 April 2019

Three roundtable discussions around the general theme of evolutions. Speakers are expected to make brief (5-10 minute long) opening remarks focusing on the development the field of Cinema & Media Studies through their own personal lens. Opening remarks will be followed by discussion.

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9-10am | Coffee & Pastries

10-12pm | 1st Roundtable | World Cinema/National Cinema | Rahul Mukherjee, Moderator

Dudley Andrew is the R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale. He began his career at the University of Iowa with three books commenting on film theory, including the biography of André Bazin, whose ideas whose he continues to explore in What Cinema Is!, and the edited volumes Opening Bazin, and A Companion to Francois Truffaut. He was named “Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres” by the French Ministry of Culture in recognition of his books Mists of Regret (1995) and Popular Front Paris (2005). His fascination with Japan led him to co-author a sourcebook on Mizoguchi Kenji and a monograph on that director’s masterpiece Sansho Dayu. His teaching and research are divided between questions of World Cinema and literature (such as translation and adaptation) and aspects of 20th century French intellectual life (especially theories of the image). His film analyses appeared in Film in the Aura of Art  and he has authored introductions and video essays on a number of French and Japanese classics for DVDs editions. He is currently completing French Cinema: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford) and Encountering World Cinema.

Peter Lešnik is a Ph.D. Candidate in Italian Studies and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Penn, he earned an MA from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, graduating with a master thesis on the American filmmaker David Lynch. He is currently completing his doctoral dissertation, entitled An Adaptive Auteur: Michelangelo Antonioni and His Literary Encounters, which represents the first systematic study of Antonioni’s adaptations. He has published two book chapters on Italian modern and contemporary literature, while his articles “Pavese, Antonioni, and the Specters of a Silenced Past” and “Michelangelo Antonioni’s Images of the Planet in the Anthropocene” are forthcoming in the journals Adaptation and Synoptique.

Meta Mazaj is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema and Media Studies at University of Pennsylvania. Her writings on critical theory, new European cinema, Eastern European cinema, and contemporary world cinema, have appeared in edited volumes and journals such as Cineaste, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, and Situations. She is the author of National and Cynicism in the Post 1990s Balkan Cinema (VDM Verlag, 2008), co-editor (with Timothy Corrigan and Patricia White) of Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2010), and co-author, with Shekhar Deshpande, of World Cinema: A Critical Introduction (Routledge, 2018).

Timothy Murray is Director of the Cornell Council for the Arts, Professor of Comparative Literature and English and Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art in the Cornell Library. A curator of new media and contemporary art, and theorist of visual studies and digital culture, he forges international intersections in exhibition and print between the arts, humanities, and technology. His publications include Medium Philosophicum: Thinking Art Technologically (Universidad de Murcia, forthcoming, 2019), Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008), Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed. with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998), ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997), ed. with Shin-Yi Yang, Xu Bing’s Background Story and his Oeuvre (Mandarin) (Beijing: Life Bookstore Publishing, 2016), and ed. with Irving Goh, The Prepositional Senses of Jean-Luc Nancy, 2 Vols., diacritics (2014-16). His recent exhibitions include the 2018 Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial, “Duration: Passage, Persistence, Survival,” “The Experimental Television Center: A History, ETC,” with Sarah Watson and Sherry Miller Hocking at Hunter College Galleries, NY, and “Signal to Code: 50 Years of Media Art in the Goldsen Archive” in the Cornell Library and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

Eric Rentschler is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and a faculty member of the Film and Visual Studies Program at Harvard University. His books include West German Film in the Course of Time (Redgrave, 1984), German Film and Literature (Methuen, 1986), West German Filmmakers on Film (Holmes & Meier, 1988), Augenzeugen (Verlag der Autoren, 1988; second updated edition 2001), The Films of G.W. Pabst (Rutgers UP, 1990), The Ministry of Illusion (Harvard UP, 1996), Neuer Deutscher Film (Reclam, 2012), and The Use and Abuse of Cinema: German Legacies from the Weimar Era to the Present (Columbia UP, 2015).

12-1pm |  Lunch

1-3pm | 2nd Roundtable | Realisms and Ideologies | Karen Redrobe, Moderator

Nora M. Alter is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), Chris Marker (2006), co-editor with L. Koepnick of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004), and co-editor with T. Corrigan, Essays on the Essay Film (2017). Her most recent book is The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction (2018). Alter has published over sixty essays on German and European Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural and Visual Studies and Contemporary Art. She has written on artists including John Akomfrah, Yael Bartana, Daniel Buren, Stan Douglas, Maria Eichhorn Dan Eisenberg, Renée Green, Hans Haacke, Mathias Poledna, and others. She is former recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, and has been awarded year-long research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Howard Foundation and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Iggy Cortez is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Film and Media Department at Swarthmore College. He received his PhD in the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania where he specialized in Cinema & Media Studies and Contemporary Art. Previously, he earned an MA with Distinction from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London and a BA with Honors in the History of Art from Columbia University. He curated Itinerant Belongings with Charlotte Ickes, a multisite exhibition and series of events featuring the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Yael Bartana, William Pope.L and Krzysztof Wodiczko among others.

Ivone Margulies is Professor of Film Studies at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center (City University of New York.) Her most recent book In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema (Oxford U. Press, 2018) was launched with a related series at Anthology Film Archives. She is the author of Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday (Duke U Press, 1996); translated into Portuguese (2015) and Spanish (2018); and the editor of Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema (Duke U. Press 2003). Margulies’ interests revolve around performance and realism; She has written on John Cassavetes, Eric Rohmer, Jean Rouch, as well as on artists Steve Fagin, Stan Douglas, Sharon Lockhart and Ana Maria Maiolino. She co-edited with B. Ruby Rich a dossier on Chantal Akerman (Film Quarterly, Fall 2016); published and staged (with Flora Sussekind) Akerman’s Une Famille en Bruxelles in Portuguese. On Women’s Films: Across Worlds and Generations, co-edited with Jeremi Szaniawski will be out in Fall 2019 (Bloomsbury).

Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of thirteen books, including The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (2017), Teaching Film (2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest U.S. professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.

Rebecca A. Sheehan is Associate Professor of Cinema and Television Arts at California State University, Fullerton. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Haverford College, and a Visiting Associate Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She has co-edited a book entitled Border Cinema: Reimagining Identity Through Aesthetics (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and has recently finished a manuscript entitled American Avant-Garde Cinema and the Ethics of the In-between forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Her work on topics ranging from experimental cinema, sculpture and cinema, epistolary cinema, the biopic and border cinema has appeared in edited book collections and various journals including Discourse, Screen, and Screening the Past.

3-3:30pm | Break

3:30-5:30pm | 3rd Roundtable | New Topics and New Pedagogies | Peter Decherney, Moderator

Lucy Fischer is a Distinguished Professor, Emerita of English and Film Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Jacques Tati; Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema; Imitation of Life; Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre; Sunrise; Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and the Female Form; Stars: The Film Reader; American Cinema of the 1920s: Themes and Variations; Teaching Film; Body Double: The Author Incarnate in the Cinema; Art Direction and Production Design; Cinema by Design: Art Nouveau, Modernism, and Film History and Cinemagritte: René Magritte Within the Frame of Film History, Theory and Practice (forthcoming). She held a curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and for the Humanities. She was President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and received its Distinguished Service Award. At Pitt she received the Provost’s Excellence in Mentorship Award and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award.

Eleni Palis is a PhD candidate in the English Department, concentrating in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation research focuses on the re-appropriation of classical Hollywood film fragments in contemporary American cinema. She revised the Oxford Bibliographies Online entry for “Auteurism,” and her article “The Economics and Politics of Auteurism: Spike Lee and Do the Right Thing” was recently published in Cinema Journal.

Dana Polan is a professor of Cinema Studies in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is the author of 8 books in film and media studies. He has done dvd commentaries for close to a dozen films. He is a former president of the Society for Cinema Studies and former editor of its publication, Cinema Journal. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford and a Doctorat d’Etat from the Sorbonne Nouvelle. He has been knighted by the Ministry of Culture of the French government for contributions to cross-cultural exchange. In 2002, he was selected as one of the two Academy Scholars for that year by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 

Patricia White is Eugene Lang Research Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at Swarthmore College. She is the author of Women’s Cinema/World Cinema: Projecting Contemporary Feminisms (Duke University Press 2015) and Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Indiana University Press, 1999). She is co-author with Timothy Corrigan of The Film Experience (Bedford St. Martins, 5th ed. 2017) and co-editor, with Corrigan and Meta Mazaj, of Critical Visions in Film Theory (Bedford St. Martins, 2011). White serves on the board of the non-profit feminist media arts organization Women Make Movies, the advisory board of Film Quarterly, and the editorial collective of the feminist film journal Camera Obscura. She recently edited a special issue on the work and legacy of Chantal Akerman.

5:30pm | Celebratory Reception!

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