Category: Film
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Scholar Spotlight: Marilia Kaisar
My work and research focus on the intersection of art practice, theory, and technology. I have been seeking spaces to engage with those ideas in theory and as a pedagogical tool. When I learned about HASTAC scholars through a departmental email, I decided it would be great to connect with other scholars and graduate students working on similar domains beyond my institution.
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Public + Digital Humanities
What happens when a media production specialist and literature educator work together? We decide to make a video-based mural of the different counties in our home state where we invite folks to pointedly recognize and celebrate the diversity around us. Margaret Baker (PhD student in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at NC State University) and I […]
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I Love Wanda: Transcending the Screen of Gender Roles
In the past, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has often been critiqued for falling short with its development of female characters. In favor of action-packed movies, nuance and development of characters was often implied as background or crammed into origin movies. Of course, until 2019, no female Marvel character had been given her own origin […]
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Campbell and the Computer (2): 1949
The year of publication of Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces turns out to have been a fortuitous one, as far as my own work and personal retrospective go, anyway. The same post-war academic flurry produced Alan Turing’s landmark 1949 paper ‘Can Machines Think?’, containing the mathematician’s speculations on the capacities of Turing’s newly-advanced computational engines […]
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Scholar Spotlight: Azalia Muchransyah
1. Why did you apply to HASTAC? I applied as a 2019-2021 HASTAC Scholar after I went to an introductory meeting held by two HASTAC Scholars who are now teaching at my campus, University at Buffalo (UB): Margaret Rhee and Cody Mejeur. I heard so many great things about HASTAC during that meeting, but the […]
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Review of Learning Queer Identity in the Digital Age
The concept of a queer identity is, at times, paradoxical. While half of the definitions Webster lists for “identity” refer to a condition of “sameness,” “queer” is frequently evoked to indicate a breaking away from categorization. Not to begin a review with a dictionary entry, but this is the tension that Kay Siebler beautifully navigates […]
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The Best of Enemies in Trump’s America: Memorializing an Unlikely Coalition
If an Exalted Grand Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan (yes, that’s a real thing) can denounce his membership and become an advocate for civil rights, then so can you, racist America. The 2019 film The Best of Enemies offers a story of redemption—indeed, the white man’s redemption—through the interactions between the formidable black civil […]
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Surrealist Film and Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You
The purpose of this presentation was to discuss the characteristics and artistic and thematic impacts of surrealist film elements, especially within films that engage with mediations of race. To that end, we focused specifically on one film that has been labeled surrealist and Afro-surrealist by various critics: Boots Riley’s 2018 Sorry to Bother You (while […]
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Review of Mapping Movies
Communications and Media scholar Jeffrey Klenotic’s Mapping Movies provides a pioneering model for digitally marking, quantifying, and demographically identifying US movie theaters in the early twentieth century. It includes options to limit searches based on gender, immigration, and location. Arguing for a relationship between population demography, film exhibition, spectatorship, and space, these maps complement historical […]
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Coming to America
Opening our discussion of Eddie Murphy’s Coming to America (1988) and Professor Gates’s first chapter in Double Negative on February 13, Professor Davidson led us in an Entry Ticket activity in which students wrote on flashcards their responses to a question and shared them out loud with the class. The question, in light of the film’s sequel […]