Presentations
Ph.D. alum Panpan Yang presented her paper "Xu Bing's the Character of Characters and the Possibilities of Calligraphic Animation," and won the Honorable Mention at the Inaugural Conference of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies in 2021.
Awards
Ph.D. alum Christina Peterson recently received the Robert A. Staub Distinguished Teacher Award from Eckerd College.
Alumni Joshua Yumibe (PhD 2007) received the 'Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award' from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) for the book he co-authored with Sarah Street Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s. His scholarship on early color films was featured in a recent Tableau article "Beyond Black and White"
Alumni Allison Whitney (PhD 2005) received the 'Distinguished Pedagogy Award' from the Society of Cinema (SMCS) and Media Studies.
Announcements
ODL Fellow and CMS alumni Artemis Willis (PhD 2020) is currently working on a monograph titled Lanternology: The Magic Lantern and the Possibilities of the Projected Image. Lanternology offers an alternative and complementary approach to the study of the magic lantern by excavating a corpus of previously unrecognized lantern performances and theorizing its implications for media history. Willis focuses on the later history of the lantern—a medium that emerged among a cluster of optical devices in the seventeenth century—and examines how its interaction with such media and commercial entertainments as motion pictures, comics, stage melodrama, vaudeville, photography, and electric light shaped its aesthetic and cultural practices. In doing so, she argues, it poses a challenge to evolutionary accounts of technological progress while also recasting debates that have informed conventional modes of media-historical inquiry. What emerges is an original account of an old medium of ongoing transition and transformation, which raises new questions about how we write media history, even as—and especially because—it is being rewritten vis-à-vis the digital turn.
During her time as an ODL Fellow, one of the topics Willis is taking up is an investigation of how the lantern participates in and sheds light on the documentary project. She is also developing a digital version of the Keystone 600 Set, a seminal visual-instructional system of corresponding and cross-referring views (lantern slides and stereographs), and creating a hybrid slide-film performance piece.