New article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kelli Marshall

Dr. Kelli Marshall has a new article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education today, entitled "I'm an Academic, and I Run a Fan Site," about her experiences running a popular Gene Kelly website.

               

"From what I can surmise, it is unusual for an academic to run a fan site," says Marshall, "especially with her name, profession and online identity clearly attached. But why is this the case?" she asks.

See the full article here:
"I'm an Academic, and I Run a Fan Site"

Prof. Davis Receives VEF Grant for 'Christianity & Comic Books' Project

Prof. Blair Davis recently received a grant from DePaul University's Vincentian Endowment Fund in support of a project entitled 'Christianity and Comic Books.' Davis seeks to build a collection of Christian comic books to be housed in the DePaul Library’s Special Collections department, where they may be used for both teaching and research purposes. The collection will contain approximately forty comic books dating back as far as the 1940s, and including such works as Picture Stories From the Bible and Bible Tales for Young Folk. Examples of more recent titles include the 1982 comic book The Life of Pope John Paul II, and the 2003 comic book The Bible: Eden.

                        

"Comic books have served as a vibrant form through which Catholic beliefs and culture have been disseminated. By preserving this legacy, DePaul University will further add to its Vincentian identity by allowing current and future students and scholars to benefit from these rarely seen representations of Christianity in popular culture," says Davis.

Please see the DePaul University Newsline article for further information on the Vincentian Endowment Fund Awards: http://www.depaulnewsline.com/features/2015-vincentian-endowment-fund-awards-announced

Prof. Paul Booth Interviewed for WIRED Magazine Article

Prof Paul Booth was interviewed for a recent Wired article about the use of social media within sports fandom. Speaking about NBA star Stephen Curry, Booth tells of how “We’re seeing a lot of fandoms merging technologies and practices in the digital age... Fans who participate in multiple fandoms use the same kinds of methodologies. So what they might make for an X-Files fansite, they also might make for Steph Curry.”



The article, entitled "The Unprecedented, Unstoppable Fandom of Steph Curry," also quotes Booth as saying that “In the past, fandom was something you might participate in within a small community... It was geographically bound. People would go to games or fan conventions, but it was intended to be a much smaller affair.”

MCS Minor in 'Fandom, Cult Media, and Subculture Studies' Coming Fall 2016!

The Media and Cinema Studies Program is proud to to be part of a new minor in Fandom, Cult Media, and Subculture Studies which will begin in Fall 2016.

The College of Communication currently features multiple classes across many programs and curricula that all focus on the idea of “cult” media or subcultural audiences—that is, aspects of culture that are separate from, or differentiate themselves from, the mainstream, or that present new ways of examining consumers and the emotional resonance of various media products on contemporary audiences.


Courses that focus on genre films and television, audience analysis, affect, and cult products span the Communication Studies,  Media and Cinema Studies, Journalism, and Public Relations and Advertising programs. This new minor will unite these courses under one banner in order to provide interested students with a focused concentration on fandom and cult media.

The purpose of this minor is to allow students to understand how audiences and media producers design media texts to confront and challenge contemporary ideologies, to offer alternatives to the mainstream, and to engineer deliberate affective reactions in audiences.


Learning Goals for the Fandom, Cult Media, and Subculture Studies Minor:

Identify critical components of the contemporary media and communication environment, and audience reaction to them

Differentiate cult and mainstream media texts along with their diverse contexts of production, distribution and reception

Describe contemporary audience behaviors

Apply media and communication theories to genre film, television, and new media texts

Analyze the content and aesthetics of cult texts


A list of specific classes that will apply towards this new minor will be announced soon, and will include courses on fan studies, comic books, B-movies, sports fandom, horror cinema, celebrity studies and more.

MCS Hosts the Chicago Film Seminar, Wed. January 13th - "Why Film History?"

Please join the Chicago Film Seminar on Wednesday, January 13th, at 6:30pm, for an exciting roundtable discussion, titled “Why Film History?: Discipline, Institution, and the Archive in Spanish Cinema Studies.”

Roundtable participants, Professors Vicente Sánchez-Biosca and Steven Marsh, describe the event as follows:

This discussion seeks to address approaches to the cinema of Spain. While Film History as a sub-discipline of cinema and media studies is an important institutional component of almost all media and cinema studies departments, in Spain—uniquely—it is the dominant field in such departments. Indeed, Film History is so dominant that anyone – absolutely anyone – writing on film is considered to be a film historian. 

History has a particular resonance in Spain, one doubtlessly connected not only to the trauma but also to the telos of the country’s Civil War (about which Vicente Sánchez Biosca has written extensively). This discussion aims to interrogate historiography and historical discourse as they apply to film. It is envisaged that we will focus on questions of the national, on heritage, on trauma and event.   Likewise, we will address the overlap and possible aporia that emerges between history and memory, the way affect and nostalgia shape (or contradict) historical methodologies.

Vicente Sánchez-Biosca is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Valencia and has been a Visiting Professor at New York University, Princeton University, University of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle), University of São Paulo, University of Montréal, among other schools. He was the editor of the journal Archivos de la Filmoteca from 1992 to 2012, and is the author of several books in film theory and history. Among them are Sombras de Weimar. Contribucíon a la historia del cine alemán 1918-1933 (Verdoux, 1990); Teoría del montaje cinematográfico (Filmoteca de la Generalitat Valenciana, 1991); NO-DO. El tiempo y la memoria (Cátedra/Filmoteca Española, 2006) and El pasado es el destino. Propaganda y cine del bando nacional en la guerra civil (both with R. Tranche, Cátedra, 2011); Cine y vanguardias artisticas. Conflictos, encuentros, fronteras (Paidós, 2004); Cine de historia, cine de memoria: La representacíon y sus límites  (Cátedra, 2006); Cine y Guerra civil española (Alianza, 2006). His current research is focused on the production and circulation of images of atrocity in twentieth and twenty-first century cinema, photography, illustrated press, and other media.

Steven Marsh is an associate professor of Spanish Film and Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is co-editor of Gender and Spanish Cinema (Berg 2004) and author of Popular Film Under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State. He is one of the co-authors on the international collaborative project Cinema and the Mediation of Everyday Life: An Oral History of Filmgoing in 1940s and 1950s Spain. He recently edited a special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies on Spanish film and spectrality. He is currently finalizing a new monograph provisionally titled Spanish Cinema, a Counter-History: Cosmopolitanism, Experimentation, Militancy. He is on the editorial board and one of the founding editors of the Journal of Hispanic Cinemas and he is a member of the editorial collective of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.    

The Chicago Film Seminar is held at DePaul’s Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room LL 102, using the State St. entrance located at 247 S. State.

For more information about Chicago Film Seminar events, please visit http://chicagofilmseminar.blogspot.com/ and https://www.facebook.com/chicagofilmseminar 

We hope to see you there!

Two Upcoming Public Talks by Prof. Paul Booth

Prof. Paul Booth will be giving two upcoming public talks at the Driehaus Museum as part of their "Mix and Mingle at the Movies Series."

The first is on Saturday February 27th at 7:30 for a screening of Buster Keaton's The General (1925), and the second is on Saturday April 16th as part of a screening of Robert Altman's Gosford Park (2001). Both events start at 7:30 pm.

Period-appropriate costumes are highly encouraged and there will be a costume contest with prizes awarded each evening.




For more information, please see:

The General: http://www.driehausmuseum.org/programs/view/mix_mingle_at_the_movies_the_general

Gosford Park: http://www.driehausmuseum.org/programs/view/mix_mingle_at_the_movies_gosford_park

New Book from Prof. Blair Davis

Routledge recently published the anthology Rashomon Effects: Kurosawa, Rashomon and Their Legacies, co-edited by Blair Davis. The book examines the cultural and aesthetic impacts of Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, as well as the director’s larger legacies to cinema, its global audiences and beyond. It demonstrates that these legacies are not only cinematic and artistic, but also cultural and cognitive. The book moves from an examination of one filmmaker and his immediate social context in Japan, and goes on to explore how an artist’s ideas might transcend their cultural origins to ultimately provide global influences.

Chapters include new work by Stephen Prince, Andrew Horvat, Janice Matsumura, Robert Anderson, Jan Walls, Jef Burnham and Nur Yalman. It also contains some of the last published work from the late Donald Richie, one of the foremost experts on Japanese cinema.

                                    

Davis and his co-editors, Robert Anderson and Jan Walls, describe how "the essays in this volume address issues beyond the realm of Rashomon within film studies, and centre around the Rashomon effect which itself has become a widely recognized English term referring to significantly different perspectives and interpretations of different eyewitnesses to the same dramatic event. The dual figures of ripples and circles comprise the organizing image and principle of this book. The ripples represent the creative energy caused by each new iteration of the Rashomon principle, namely that any event or process usually involves more than one take, and indeed at times multiple, inconsistent, and even conflicting takes. In this book, we describe the continuing and spreading results of an event or action as ripples. Like the ever-expanding ripples moving across water when an object is dropped into it, a ripple effect occurs when there is incremental movement outwards from an initial state. This image has also been applied in financial markets to describe the impact of an event and how it circulates through the players in the industry and its effect on stock price and stock coverage. While the movement of the ripples represents the continuing and vibrant influence of Rashomon effects into the twenty-first century, the circles represent specific events, such as the publication of a new script, a particular production, or a remake."

For more information, see:
https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138827097

Study Abroad: Spain - Cinema and the City

Study Abroad: SPAIN

  Cinema and the City

  Summer 2016 / June 14 – June 27

Application Deadline: February 1, 2016

Come for 13 days to Madrid and Barcelona!    

      

Talk to filmmakers and urban activists; learn of Spanish film, and use photos and write about your experiences!

This study abroad program will introduce students to Spanish culture as it is linked to film culture and urban life.

                                  

We will visit Madrid and Barcelona, since each city represents a different side of Spanish culture. Included are visits to Plaza Mayor, Plaza del Sol, Gran Via and other places featured in past and current films. In Barcelona, we will visit the Palau of Catalan Music and the buildings by Antonio Gaudi, identified by UNESCO as part of its World Heritage list. Our focus on cinema’s representation of cultural life will be complemented with an exploration of street-level culture. We will meet film scholars, filmmakers, representatives from media organizations, and local activists involved with a variety of urban communication projects (e.g., green urbanism, hyperlocal journalism, mass transportation expansion, housing, and cultural affairs).

Students will have the opportunity to enhance their learning experience by creating a visual portfolio that expresses, through a unique imagery, their impressions and explorations of Spanish culture. Students will also write a journal, which will help them discuss their experience abroad, as much as to create their own portfolio.  The program also includes a visit to an authentic flamenco show, to the Reina Sofia Museum, a graffiti tour, a visit to the filmotheques in both cities, and travel on the high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona.

Courses and Credits
In the Spring Quarter, students register for MCS 350/523 - Topics in Global Cinema: Spanish Cinema and Urban Communication. This course explores: 1) Spanish culture and society through cinema, and 1) Representations of cities as social and symbolic spaces. By the end of the course, students will understand that Spanish cinema is linked to the country’s political, social and economic evolution and will have acquired a set of tools to navigate both cities in Spain. This course counts toward the International Communication minor. 4 credits.

In the Summer Quarter, students register for CMN 398/CMN 598 - Study Abroad Spain: Cinema and the City. This study abroad program to Spain is designed both to introduce students to Spanish culture and society as it is connected to film culture and to understand urban life and the rapid changes taking place in Spain. We will meet film scholars, filmmakers, representatives from media organizations, and local activists involved with a variety of urban communication projects (e.g., green urbanism, hyperlocal journalism, mass transportation expansion, housing, and cultural affairs). This course fulfills the Junior Year Experiential Learning (JYEL) liberal studies domain. It also counts toward the International Communication minor. 4 credits. NO LANGUAGE REQUIREMENTS

Living Arrangements

Students stay in comfortable, conveniently located hotels at the center of each city. Hotel accommodations are shared occupancy.

Costs

All students participating in study abroad will be charged both tuition and a program fee. Tuition is billed at the students’ regular DePaul tuition rate based on the number of credits enrolled. Program directors will talk about program fee at information sessions.

Contact Info

Programs directors:    Prof. Daniel Makagon dmakagon@depaul.edu and Prof. Luisela Alvaray lalvaray@depaul.edu

Study Abroad Office:  Erica Spilde espilde@depaul.edu  

Online application studyabroad.depaul.edu

MCS Hosts the Chicago Film Seminar, Thurs. Oct. 29th

The Media and Cinema Studies Program is again the proud host of the Chicago Film Seminar for 2015-16.
Please join us on Thursday, October 29th at 6:30 PM for Professor Scott Curtis (Northwestern University) as he gives a talk entitled "Experts and Their Images: Vision, Form, and the Historiography of Media Use." A response will be provided by Oliver Gaycken (University of Maryland).

The event is held held at the Loop Campus in the Daley Building at 14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room LL 102, using the State St. entrance located at 247 S. State. A reception will follow Prof. Curtis's talk.

For more information about the Chicago Film Seminar please visit their website:

http://chicagofilmseminar.blogspot.com/

Two public talks by Prof. Paul Booth

Prof. Paul Booth will be giving two public talks between Oct. 17th-18th. The first will be held at Valor Con, a gaming convention, entitled "Board Game Renaissance." The second will be held by the Comfort Society and is on "Time Travel in the Media."

For further details, please see the links below:


Oct 17, 5pm, Board Game Renaissance (www.valorcon.com)



Oct 18, 11am - Comfort Station talk on Time Travel in the Media (http://www.comfortstationlogansquare.org/events/2015/10/18/comfort-society-presents-paul-booth-on-time-travel-in-the-media)