Paul Booth Giving a Public Talk on Game Play

 Prof. Paul Booth will give a free public talk about his recent book Game Play at The Gaming Goat in Oak Park on July 23rd at 1 pm. A book signing will be held following his talk.

          

Fore more details: https://www.facebook.com/events/1399100340116653/

New Kelli Marshall article in The Chronicle of Higher Education

Dr. Kelli Marshall has a new article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled "It's Getting Personal in Here." Dr. Marshall examines how social media has changed the ways in which students can learn about their instructors' personal lives.

                     

"Thanks to social media, teacher-student relationships aren’t quite so simple anymore. Historically, of course, students and faculty have interacted informally on campus and off — in a grocery-store checkout line or at adjacent tables in a restaurant. But social-networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have introduced another, different space that contributes to a blurring of boundaries between professional and personal personas," says Marshall.

Dr. Marshall is a regular contributor to the Chronicle. Her articles are available here: https://chroniclevitae.com/people/22828-kelli-marshall/articles

Paul Booth and Blair Davis featured on Radio DePaul show

The latest episode of "Splash Pages," a Radio DePaul program hosted by Brian Pearlman about comic books, features interviews with Prof. Paul Booth and Prof. Blair Davis about the role of heroes in comics, films and beyond.

                            

The episode (#29) is available as a podcast on iTunes:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-29-heroes/id979778631?i=1000368673814&mt=2

MCS at SCMS Atlanta

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies recently held its annual conference in Atlanta from March 30-April 3, 2016, and all of our full-time faculty from the Media and Cinema Studies Program were there presenting papers. Here is an overview of what they presented:

                  

Luisela Alvaray presented a paper entitled "Visible Lives: Transgenderism in Latin American Film"

Paul Booth presented a paper entitled "SuperWhoLock and Transfandom" and participated in a workshop called "Teaching Fandom: Creative Strategies"

Blair Davis presented a paper entitled "From the Streets to the Swamp: Luke Cage, Man-Thing and the 1970s Class Issues of Marvel Comics" and chaired a workshop called "Comics and Methodology (or, Which Method Would Win in a Fight - Superman and Semiotics or the Hulk and Historiography?"

Michael DeAngelis presented a paper entitled "Therapy, Cinema, and the Sexual Block"

Kelly Kessler presented a paper entitled "Who’s the Diva Here?: Male Authorship, Female Performance, and Small Screen Musicals of the Sixties"

Kelli Marshall presented a paper entitled "Annie Hall, All Grown Up: Diane Keaton, Self-referentiality, and Coming of Age in Something’s Gotta Give"

For more information on SCMS see: http://www.cmstudies.org/

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