Friday, June 29, 2012

August PhD Exam Apps

If you are planning to take the PhD Qualifying Exam in August, 2012, please bring me your application by next Friday, July 6th. I've emailed the app to the grad student distribution list, but if you need another copy, let me know and I'll send you one.

Please don't worry too much about the physical signatures of your committee members. They may email me their willingness to write questions.

If you have further questions, you have only to ask them.

Friday, June 22, 2012

CFP-Cinephilia/Cinephobia: New Mediations of Desire and Disgust

University of Pittsburgh, November 9-11, 2012
Hosted by the Film Studies Graduate Student Organization (FSGSO)

Keynote by Christian Keathley, Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College. Keathley is author ofCinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees (Indiana University Press, 2006), and currently at work on a book titled The Mystery of Otto Preminger, under contract with IU Press.

Over the last decade, academic and popular film institutions have reignited debates surrounding cinephilia and its discontents. Recent pieces in Cinema Journal, Film Comment, as well as essay collections (2005'sCinephilia: Movies, Love, and Memory) and monographs (Jonathan Rosenbaum's 2010 Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition), in modes both nostalgic and speculative, are (re)considering cinephilia not simply as love of the moving image, but as heterogeneous desires for cinema’s fragments, peculiarities, materialities, and affects. In other words, we can be certain that cinephilic (and cinephobic) attitudes and practices are quite alive today – but for whom, in what forms, and to what ends?

Attending these critical conversations are ever-encroaching “aversions” toward cinema, including institutional prohibitions, censorship against filming and exhibition, modes of media refusal, and institutional objections to the moving image’s dissemination and preservation. If cinephilia has long raised tensions between academic and popular critical voices, between preservation and fetishism, and between film appreciation and critique, how are these tensions recovered or recast in contemporary film and media studies – particularly in light of digital media, new categories and avenues of “criticism,” and media studies’ present investment in affective response? Susan Sontag famously expressed the joy of cinematic immersion as a “kidnapping” that requires the physical experience of a darkened theater; how, then, does cinephobia stand to transform a desire for cinematic experience into a revolt against the powers of the cinematic apparatus and its affective control?

Following Marijke de Valck’s assertion that cinephilia endures “precisely because it forms a bridge between the biographical and the theoretical, the singular and the general, the fragment and the whole, the incomplete and the complete, and the individual and the collective,” our conference invites presentations that consider the enduring importance of cinephilia and cinephobia to film and media studies: both how these ideas have shaped and articulated our complex relations to moving images, and how they continue to raise new questions for our field.

Possible topics may include:

* Cinephilia/phobia through digital media (mash-ups and remixes; GIFs; Twitter, Tumblr, and online community)
* Cinephilic/phobic expressions in TV and other visual media (art, installation, fashion)
* Cinephilia/phobia and video games
* Desire, disgust, and pornography
* Cinephilic/phobic expressions in “non-visual” fields (literature, music, philosophy)
* Queer spectatorship, historiography, and affect
* Transnational and subcultural cinephilias/phobias
* Affective modes of spectatorship, “fan” practices and fictions
* Obsession with and/or distrust of medium and site specificity (VHS, Super 16mm, theaters and exhibition practices, protest and destruction)
* Endangered and extinct media technology and practices
* Desire, disgust, and archival work
* Historical and contemporary forms of film criticism (from Cahiers to the video essay)
* Institutional and “underground” modes of exhibition (film festivals, award systems, art house, 3D)
* Phobia from within: media boycotts and oppositional viewing practices
* Phobia from without: prohibition and censorship, fair use practices
* Cinephilia/phobia as methodology, ideology, and/or pathology
* Cinephilia/phobia and film pedagogy

We welcome approaches from a range of disciplines, including but not limited to: Film and Media studies, Art and Art History, Visual Culture, Feminist and Queer Studies, Communication, Critical Theory, Literature, Musicology, and Philosophy. 

Interested graduate students may submit abstracts (maximum 300 words) – along with institutional/departmental affiliations and current email – to pittfilmgradconference@gmail.com. For more information, please contact the FSGSO by email at the above, or visit our website, Special Affects:http://www.fsgso.pitt.edu

CFP-Evaluating and Assesing Broabdand Policy



Is it working? Evaluating and assessing broadband policy

A by-invitation experts’ workshop
New America Foundation
September 19-21, 2012

With broadband becoming the central means for providing information services in the 21st century, policymakers struggle with choosing the best model to ensure universal access, adoption and usage. Broadband policy choices range from massive government investments to total deregulation and everything in between—including various combinations of regulatory regimes, limited government investment and public-private partnerships. Debates regarding the best path to follow often tend to reflect ideological convictions or stakeholder interests. It is thus requisite to provide analytic scholarly input to the debate, delivered through the evaluation and assessment of broadband deployment policies that have been adopted in recent years.

The Institute for Information Policy at Penn State University and the New America Foundation are pleased to announce this call for paper proposals focused on discussing and exploring the assessment and evaluation of broadband policies and their implementation.  Proposals based on new research data and analysis are especially welcome.

Authors of the selected papers will be invited to present and discuss them during a three day by-invitation-only experts workshop designed to bring together up to a dozen American and international experts to be held at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., between September 19 - 21, 2012. This workshop is part of a series of events focused on “Making Policy Research Accessible,” organized by the IIP, with the support of the Ford Foundation and the Media Democracy Fund. For programs of previous workshops see: https://blogs.comm.psu.edu/iip/?page_id=24). Presenters at the workshop will be invited to submit their completed papers for review by the Journal of Information Policy (www.jip-online.org).

Topics of papers may include, but are not limited to issues such as:
·         Methodologies for the assessment of broadband projects
·         Case studies of assessment of broadband policy implementations
·         Assessment and evaluation of specific BTOP projects and of the BTOP process
·         Assessment and evaluation of state-level broadband policy implementations
·         Case studies of other public and private broadband initiatives
·         Theory of policy evaluation and its application to broadband
·         The opportunity costs of delayed reforms and regulations
·         Impacts of the rate of progress of broadband policy
·         Comparative studies of broadband policies and their implementation
·         Proposals for a meaningful set of metrics for broadband evaluation
·         Identification of a uniform set of indicators for successful broadband policies
·         Evaluation of broadband training and capacity-building programs and activities
·         Evaluation of broadband programs for historically unserved or underserved communities
·         Assessment of broadband initiatives directed at community and civil society institutions

Abstracts of up to 500 words and a short bio of the author(s) should be submitted to pennstateiip@psu.edu by July 15, 2012. Please write IIPNAFIIWWS: [YOUR NAME] in the subject line. Accepted presenters will be notified by July 31, 2012.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Employment Opportunity: Columbia College Chicago


One-Year Lecturer in Cultural Studies,
Cultural Studies Program
Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences

The Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago invites applications for a One-Year Cultural Studies Lecturer position for its Cultural Studies Program starting August 16, 2012.  Minimum qualifications include:  An ABD in Cultural Studies or related field (Ph.D. Preferred) and at least two years experience teaching  introductory cultural studies courses, such as Introduction to Cultural Studies and Cultural Theories, at a college-level institution
(see http://colum.edu/culturalstudies for curriculum details).  Preference will be given to candidates who work in one or more of the following areas: (New) Media studies; visual culture and political economy; American Studies; Asian American Studies; and post-colonial studies.

Columbia College Chicago is an urban institution of over 12,000 undergraduate and graduate students emphasizing arts, media, and communications in a liberal arts setting.

How to Apply:

All applicants must apply online at www.colum.edu/EmploymentServices (Job ID 100384).

Please note that the posting will appear internally as of June 5 and externally as of June 8 under ID 100384.

IMPORTANT: Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled.  To ensure full consideration, please submit a letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and the names of three references.  Only materials submitted through Columbia College Chicago's online portal will be considered.

At the start of the online application, please upload ONE document that combines your letter of interest, curriculum vitae, and statement of teaching philosophy; do not upload each document separately. The title of your document should be less than 60 characters and saved as a word.doc, word.dox, or PDF only.

Complete the online application, including the names and contact information for three references.

You will receive an email confirmation once you have successfully submitted your application.

If you experience technical difficulties please email careers@colum.edu. Do not contact the hiring department or search committee for assistance.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Columbia College Chicago encourages qualified female, LGBTQ, disabled, and minority individuals to apply for all positions.

For more information about this position, please contact:

Jaafar Aksikas, Chair
Cultural Studies Search Committee
Cultural Studies Program
Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences Columbia College Chicago
624 S Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL
Jaksikas@colum.edu

CFP - Reception and Cultural Diversity


Reception Study and Cultural Diversity

We are soliciting submissions for a collection of essays on Reception Study and Cultural Diversity.   Essays may address the following topics:  theoretical developments in reception study and theories of reading (e.g. on the concepts of “horizon of expectation,” “implied reader,” “rhetorical” or “historical” hermeneutics”) necessitated by reception in the context of cultural diversity;  accounts of reading across cultural differences;   the role of reception in the production of a multicultural literary tradition; the role of reception in production of African American, Native American, Asian American, Latino American literary traditions; reception histories of specific works and authors; the problematics of addressing a multicultural readership; the academic and popular reception of specific texts; the phenomenon of transnational reception; the relationship of reception and immigration; and other related topics.  The deadline for completed manuscripts is  October 1, 2012.  Essays will be published in our co-edited collection and in a special issue of the RSS  journal Reception.

Send proposals, and inquiries to:

Patsy Schweickart, Department of English
Purdue University
pschweic@purdue.edu

or

Phil Goldstein
University of Delaware-Wilmington
pgold@udel.edu