Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Hail, Caesar!, Kel R. Karpinski

Publications and Research

This piece looks at queer characters in the Coen Brothers’ film Hail, Caesar! (2016). The film takes place during the heyday of the Hollywood film studio set in 1951 and draws on many films during that time period of the 1930s, 40s and 50s.

No Longer, Not Yet: Retrofuture Hauntings On The Jetsons, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

From Back to the Future to The Wonder Years, from Peggy Sue Got Married to The Stray Cats’ records – 1980s youth culture abounds with what Michael D. Dwyer has called “pop nostalgia,” a set of critical affective responses to representations of previous eras used to remake the present or to imagine corrective alternatives to it. Longings for the Fifties, Dwyer observes, were especially key to America’s self-fashioning during the Reagan era (2015).

Moving from these premises, I turn to anachronisms, aesthetic resonances, and intertextual references that point to, as Mark Fisher would have it, both a lost past …

Direct Action Housing: Exploring The History Of Tenant-Led Housing Struggles—On Film—In Nyc, Arielle Lawson

Publications and Research

This independent research project dives into the history of tenant-led housing struggles in New York City with a particular focus on using film archives and documentaries to highlight key moments and case studies when housing activism opened up new political imaginations, intersections and possibilities in the city.

As outlined in the Direct Action Housing zine, I curated and hosted four public events in the spring of 2019 on different aspects of housing struggles documented through archival film records. This series of housing history films was a starting point and catalyst to think about the role of and for the home …

“In The Beginning Was Body Language” Clowning And Krump As Spiritual Healing And Resistance, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In the neighborhood of HollyWatts in Los Angeles, dance allows a shift from existing as bodies presented as sites of threat and extinction to sources of spiritual empowerment. Clowning and Krump dancers—their subjectivity and their dancing bodies—negotiate survival from trauma and socioeconomic marginalization. I argue that the dancers’ performances act as embodied narratives of “re-membering in the flesh.” The performance acts as a spiritual retrieval and re-integration of traumatic memories and afflictions into memory through the body. Choreography and quotes from dancers support the claim that Krump and Clowning is “re-membering in the flesh” that enacts self-worth, self-defined sexuality, and …

Queer Pedagogical Desire: A Study Guide, Matt Brim

Publications and Research

This essay explores the queer pedagogical desires that attended my writing of the Study Guide for the documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (Jim Hubbard, 2012). The analysis takes up Robyn Wiegman’s central question in Object Lessons, “What is it we expect our relationship to our objects of study to do?”, which is of particular importance to the discipline of queer studies insofar as the field is oriented around the desire to meld social justice with critical pedagogy. The queer professor’s desire in the case of the Study Guide-as-object was to create a text that …

Meta-Radicalism: The Alternative Press By And For Activist Librarians, Alycia Sellie

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Murrow And Friendly’S Small World: Television Conversation At The Crossroads, Kathleen Collins

Publications and Research

Small World

(1958–60), an Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly television production, brought together political and entertainment figures from around the world, boasting technological innovation and a high level of public affairs discourse. The author discusses critical reception, producers’ ideals, cultural and historical context, and relation-ships to evolving notions of public service broadcasting.

A Dissonant Declaration From The Fed-Up Humans Of America, Stuart Ewen Ph.D.

Publications and Research

In October of 1997 a Media and Democracy Congress was held in the Great Hall of The Cooper Union. Appearing under his nom de plume, Archie Bishop, the author delivered a revision of the Declaration of Independence which, for many years, was unavailable in printed form. Then, a few years back, Hideaki Hirano—a prominent Japanese sociologist—posted a written version in Japanese translation. Now, Academic Works will serve as the repository in which the original document will be made available to a reading and thinking public.

One Against All: The New England Past And Present Responsibilities In The Devil And Daniel Webster, Robert Singer

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.