Queer Cinema, Summer 2019
This course will offer students the opportunity to study the intersection gay, lesbian, and queer sexualities and their representations in film (or lack thereof) throughout the 20th century and into the present. We will contextualize our readings of films through the study of historical documents, formal aesthetics of film, and theoretical texts from the disciplines of film theory, gender studies, and queer theory. To examine how representations of sexuality have both historical and formal specificities, we will view films chronologically, spanning from the Motion Picture Production Code in the age of classical Hollywood cinema, to the Post-Stonewall era, to New Queer Cinema movement, and finally ending with queer representations in contemporary mainstream cinema.

Film History: 1989 – Present, Summer 2021
Many film classes focus upon discourses that construct film as a medium with its own ontologies and affordances, or as an industry that is primarily America and complicit with capitalism (while also offering certain modes of resistance). The history of film from 1989 to the present taught here will work against this dominant model.  Instead, the course traces the primary forces that reinvented film in the late 20^th century: globalization, social movements, and digitization. Foundational film courses, with their emphasis on film’s history as an indexical medium or as a Euro-American industry, tend to treat global cinema, issues of race and gender, and the changing nature of the medium itself, as intrusive afterthoughts; they are either added on to the end of syllabi as addendum (and then often cut when a course inevitably “runs out of time” to cover all the material) or as small concessions under pressure to “diversify” courses. This version of Film History, 1989-Present, reverses this impulse by considering the global, the social, and the digital as film history, as part of film itself—not as marginal trends threatening the status quo, or unwelcome challenges to film’s history. This approach challenges film not only as a medium and industry, but as a discipline that is still heavily Eurocentric and male-dominated.