Events
Past Events › Talks
October 2020
TV News & Racial Justice in the U.S.: Critical Reflections on a 2020 Letter-writing Campaign
With Anna Everett, Brandy Monk-Payton, Lisa Parks, Jade Petermon In this timely one-hour webinar, Professors Anna Everett and Lisa Parks discuss a letter-writing campaign they initiated in the summer of 2020 to address the topic of black employees in TV news networks and the coverage of U.S. race relations in TV news. They will discuss the campaign’s origins and the responses it elicited, offering critical reflections about the process. Everett and Parks will be joined by two scholars who participated…
Find out more »November 2020
Panel Discussion: Dialectics without Synthesis
This Film and Media Studies/Carsey-Wolf Center Colloquium will feature Naoki Yamamoto’s recently published monograph, Dialectics without Synthesis: Japanese Film Theory and Realism in a Global Frame (UC Press, 2020). The monograph explores Japan’s active but previously unrecognized contributions to the global circulation of film theory during the first half of the Twentieth Century. It is in an attempt to break with our conventional treatment of “theory” as the exclusive domain of the West. The event will feature brief presentations by…
Find out more »February 2021
Hieroglyphics of the Film: Stuplimity and Static in the Films of Ja’Tovia Gary – Kelli Moore (MCC-Steinhardt, NYU)
This talk examines the film and video oeuvre of Ja’Tovia Gary. It focuses on the strategies she employs to address blackness as both sociopolitical narrative and a material quality of film. Gary’s interaction with the staging of her experimental films and film as matter are historical and technical. By reference to the Giverny Suite film series, I recount how the filmmaker encouraged her audience to move about the screening space by thematizing the notion of “stuplimity,” following the writing of…
Find out more »Transworlding (II): Jahan Z Ahmed (Global Studies), “Infrastructures of Islamism in Cold War Pakistan”
This chapter maps the U.S. cultural Cold War institutions, their context, objectives and investments in Islamist imaginaries and how they collectively helped build information infrastructures for Islamist social worlds. It particularly focuses on the institutions involved in influencing print cultures i.e., the Congress for Cultural Freedom - Pakistan Committee (CCF-Pak) and Franklin Book Programs (FBP) and the physical spaces in Pakistan such as universities, publishing houses and libraries where they constructed alliances and patronage networks.
Find out more »March 2021
GMTaC Lab Research Lecture: “Silicon Valley’s Caste System: Race, Class and All Women Coding Boot Camps” by Professor France Winddance Twine, UCSB
Why do Black women comprise roughly 1.2% of technical workers in Silicon Valley technology firms? In this talk, Twine examines the 'inequality regimes' that currently operate in Silicon Valley and how recruiting practices shape the recruitment, retention, and treatment of technically-skilled women of diverse ethnic and class backgrounds.
Find out more »Backyard Theory Meeting in March, 2021
Professor Bhaskar Sarkar will facilitate a group discussion of Sandro Messadra and Brett Neilson's book, Border as Method: Or the Multiplication of Labor (Duke UP, 2013). If you are interested in participating in this discussion, please contact Tinghao Zhou at: tinghaozhou@ucsb.edu
Find out more »Transworlding (III): Hongyuan Jin (Economics), “The Influence of Foreign-born Directors on the US Film Industry”
This chapter is the quantitative analysis on whether foreign-born directors show higher film yields than native-born directors in terms of the domestic and international box office, and the number of awards (e.g. Oscars) and award nominations. The study is conducted on a data set that I collected from multiple sources, and the data set includes about 27 thousand US-produced films released between 1925 and 2018.
Find out more »April 2021
“Perhaps Eartha Kitt is the Instrument…:” How a Supernova Defied Stardom – Dr. Philana Payton (Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCLA)
In this talk, I consider the multiple ways Eartha Kitt commanded narrative ownership through her engagement with autobiography, as well as her performative practices. In 1956, she published her first autobiography (of four) at the age of twenty-nine entitled Thursday’s Child. In it, she revealed how performance was not simply reserved for the stage and screen, but that it was the very essence that was Eartha Kitt. Her recognition of Eartha Kitt as an entity separate from her true self…
Find out more »June 2021
2021 UCSB FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES GRADUATION RECOGNITION CEREMONY
Edited by Keith Boynton, and Chris Jenkins, graphics Dana Welch Special Thanks to Acting Dean Mary Hancock, Tom Lazarus and Michael Siegel download a pdf of the program Graduation Recognition Ceremony June 13, 2021 Wishing You Success in the Future Welcoming Remarks Peter Bloom Department Chair Mary Hancock Acting Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, Director of Curricular Initiatives Departmental Address Peter Bloom Film & Media Studies Senior Projects and Memory Highlights Compiled by…
Find out more »January 2022
“Sly As A Fox: Twentieth Century-Fox, Corporate Diplomacy, and Racial Strife on the African Continent” – Ross Melnick (UC Santa Barbara)
Ross Melnick (UC Santa Barbara) Thursday, January 27, 2:00-3:30 pm PT Zoom Link: https://brandeis.zoom.us/j/93467786764. Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way. In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to…
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