MIMS8003

This course will familiarize graduate students with key methods, archival resources, theoretical debates, and curatorial practices in film and media historiography. What kinds of discourses on history can films represent? And what materials and practices do scholars enlist in situating the moving image’s entanglement with fragmented archives of society, politics, aesthetics, and culture? We will approach these complex questions through a variety of means, including working with local and digitized archives, reenacting theoretical debates in the classroom, curating our own collective program at a local movie theater, and thinking about the limits of how history gets written within our critical humanities disciplines. Of course, we will also watch films and other moving images, which we will approach as historiographic discourses in themselves that push back against and complicate the assigned readings. Above all, we will explore what it means to do film and media historiography NOW.

Every Spring