Biography
Aurore Spiers (she/her) is a film and media scholar and historian. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from The University of Chicago in 2022. Mainly focused on women’s contributions to film and media, her work interrogates historiographical processes—what history gets written, how, and why—through the lens of gender and intersectional and multidimensional feminism. It asks why women (and other marginalized groups) have so often been forgotten, and what strategies—critical, creative, speculative, etc.—may be employed against historical erasure.
Her first book, currently under contract with University of California Press, studies women’s labor in French film archives from the 1920s through the 1970s. It examines three different historiographical practices—“collection” (library cataloging), “recollection” (oral interviews), and “recovery” (programming, publishing, filmmaking)—that women have not only engaged in but shaped through their experiences as historically gendered subjects. In focusing on collection, recollection, and recovery, the book emphasizes the breadth of women’s contributions to the writing of film history; it also offers a more capacious model for reflecting on the production of film historical knowledge, one that would consider gender politics as well as include not only historians but also the workers who make historical research possible by collecting, safekeeping, and giving access to historical archives and knowledge.
She has published work connected to this project as well as related to broader interests in feminist media studies and transnational cinema. Her writing and reviews have appeared in 1895: Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, Feminist Media Histories, Film & History, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, The Moving Image, and Early Visual Popular Culture, as well as several edited books. With Clara Auclair, she is currently working on an edited collection of essays dedicated to the films of Alice Guy Blaché, the first woman filmmaker in the world, and a precursor of fiction filmmaking and early sound cinema in France and the United States.
Since 2015, she has been a contributing editor to the Women Film Pioneers Project, edited by Jane Gaines, Monica Dall’Asta, Radha Vatsal, and Kate Saccone, and published by Columbia University Libraries.
Teaching Experience
Academic Year 2023-2024
BA Preceptor for written thesis students
Autumn Quarter 2023
CMST 21501: Feminist Film Histories
Winter Quarter 2024
CMST 14400: Film and the Moving Image
Spring Quarter 2024
CMST 10100: Introduction to Film
Previously taught courses: Film and the Moving Image (CMST 14400), Introduction to Film (CMST 10100), Women in Hollywood, Lecturer (CMST 21502), History of International Cinema II (1927-1960), CA (CMST 28600), Methods and Issues, CA (CMST 40000), History of International Cinema I (1895-1927), CA (CMST 28500)