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FILM AND VISUAL STUDIES PhD HARVARD UNIVERSITY


FILM AND VISUAL STUDIES STANDING COMMITTEE

Carrie Lambert-Beatty
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities
Director of Graduate Studies for Film and Visual Studies

Director of Graduate Studies for Film and Visual Studies. Lambert-Beatty is an art historian whose research focuses on contemporary art. Her research and teaching interests include minimalism, dance, media, and activist art. She is the author of Being Watched: Yvonne Rainer and the 1960s (MIT Press, 2008), which won the de la Torre prize for scholarship on dance. Her writing on performance and visual art has been published in journals such as Art Journal, Artforum, Parkett, and October magazine, of which she has been an editor since 2008, and in exhibition catalogs, most recently Gloria: Allora and Calzadilla for the U.S. Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. Lambert-Beatty received her PhD from Stanford University in 2002, and has been a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, the Getty Research Institute, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Lambert-Beatty is currently working on a book for the University of Chicago Press on contemporary art, activism, and deception, parts of which have been published in the journal Signs (Winter 2008) and October (Summer 2009). She was a 2008 winner of the Abramson Prize for undergraduate teaching at Harvard.

Eric Rentschler
Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures
Chair of the Standing Committee on Film and Visual Studies

Rentschler received his academic training in German literature and  intellectual history, studying in Stuttgart, Bonn, and Prague, before taking  his doctoral degree at the University of Washington in 1977. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Humboldt, ACLS, DAAD, and Fulbright grants as well as the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize for Senior Faculty at Harvard (2001) and the Walter Channing Cabot Fellowship (2003). He also teaches in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies. His publications concentrate on film history, theory, and criticism, with particular emphasis on German cinema during the Weimar Republic, the Third  Reich, and the post-1945 and postwall era. His numerous articles have appeared in collections and periodicals; his books include West German Film in the Course of Time (Redgrave, 1984), German Film and Literature (Methuen, 1986), West German Filmmakers on Film (Holmes & Meier, 1988), Augenzeugen (Verlag der Autoren, 1988; second updated edition 2001, with Hans Helmut Prinzler), The Films of G.W. Pabst (Rutgers University Press, 1990), The  Ministry of Illusion (Harvard University Press, 1996), and Neuer Deutscher Film 1962-1985 (Reclam, 2012, with Hans Helmut Prinzler). He is presently completing a book entitled Haunted by Hitler: The Return of the Nazi  Undead (to be published by Harvard University Press).

Giuliana Bruno
Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies

Bruno explores the intersections of film, the visual arts, and architecture. Her seminal work Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (Verso, 2002) won the 2004 Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in Culture and History — a prize awarded to “the world’s best book on the moving image” — and has provided new directions for film and visual studies. Atlas was also honored as Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, and named a Book of the Year in 2003 by the Guardian. Her new book on art and film, Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, was published by MIT Press in 2007. Bruno has published four other books. Jane and Louise Wilson: A Free and Anonymous Monument (Film and Video Umbrella and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 2004) examines the multi-screen art installation of the Turner Prize nominees. Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton University Press, 2002), a journey through modernity and cultural memory, won the 1995 Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for best book in film studies. Off Screen was devoted to women and film in Italy (Routledge, 1988), and Immagini allo schermo (Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991) was named one of the 50 Best Books of the First 100 Years of Film History. She writes frequently on contemporary art for international publications, including books on Isaac Julien (Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2005), Automatic Cities: The Architectural Imaginary in Contemporary Art (Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 2009), Space (MAXXI Museum for 21st Century Arts, Rome 2010), and exhibition catalogs of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Bruno lectures internationally on visual culture, including, recently, at universities in Europe and Asia, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, the Tate Modern, and the Louvre Museum. She is featured in Visual Culture Studies: Interviews with Key Thinkers (Sage, 2008) as one of the most influential intellectuals working today in visual studies.

Lucien Castaing-Taylor
John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and of the Social Sciences

Castaing-Taylor’s work seeks to conjugate art’s negative capability with an ethnographic attachment to the flux of life. He recently recorded Sweetgrass (2009), a film (produced by Ilisa Barbash) that is an unsentimental elegy at once to the American West and to the 10,000 years of uneasy accommodation between post-Paleolithic humans and animals. He is currently completing a related series of video and photographic Westerns that variously evoke the allure and ambivalence of the pastoral, including Hell Roaring Creek (2010) and The High Trail (2010). In 2010, he was commissioned to make a four-channel video installation by the Kino Arsenal to commemorate the four decades of the Berlinale Forum, The Quick and the Dead / Moutons de Panurge (2010). In 1995, he collaborated with Isaac Julien and Mark Nash on their film Frantz Fanon:  Black Skin White Mask. Previous works (with Barbash) include In and Out of Africa (1992), an ethnographic video about authenticity, taste, and racial politics in the transnational African art market, which won eight international awards, and Made in USA (1990), a film about sweatshops and child labor in the Los Angeles garment industry. Castaing-Taylor’s work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, has been exhibited at the Berlin Kunsthalle, Marian Goodman Gallery, the X-Initiative, and elsewhere, and has formed the subject of symposia at the British Museum, the Musée du quai Branly, and the Smithsonian Institution. His films and videos have screened at the AFI, Berlin, Locarno, New York, Toronto, and other film festivals, as well as at Punto de Vista and the Flaherty seminar. Written publications include Visualizing Theory (ed., Routledge, 1994), Cross-Cultural Filmmaking (with Barbash, University of California Press, 1997), Transcultural Cinema, a collection of essays by ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall (ed., Princeton University Press, 1998), and The Cinema of Robert Gardner (coed., with Barbash, Berg, 2008). He was the founding editor of the American Anthropological Association’s journal Visual Anthropology Review(1991–94). Castaing-Taylor is currently Director of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab and Film Study Center.

Tom Conley
Abbot Lawrence Lowell Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies
and of Romance Languages and Literatures

Conley studies relations of space and writing in literature, cartography, and cinema. His work moves to and from early modern France and issues in theory and interpretation in visual media. Books include Film Hieroglyphs (1991, new edition 2006), The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern Writing (1992), The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (1996, new edition 2010), L’Inconscient graphique: Essai sur la lettre à la Renaissance (2000), Cartographic Cinema (2007), and An Errant Eye: Topography and Poetry in Early Modern France (2010).He has published Su realismo (Valencia, 1988), a critical study of Las Hurdas (Luis Buñuel, 1932). His translations include Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (1988 and 1992), and the same author’s Capture of Speech (1997) and Culture in the Plural (1997); Marc Augé, In the Metro (2003) and Casablanca: Movies and Memory (2009); Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993); Christian Jacob, The Sovereign Map (2006); and other authors. Among his 250 articles and book-chapters are contributions to The History of Cartography 3: The European Renaissance, Cinema and Modernity, Michael Haneke, The Epic Film, Film Analysis, Opening André Bazin, Burning Darkness:  A Half-Century of Spanish Cinema, Film, Theory and Philosophy, European Film Theory, etc. He has held visiting appointments at the University of California-Berkeley, UCLA, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, L’Ecole de Chartes, L’Ecole en Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and other institutions. In 2003 he was a seminar leader at the School for Critical Theory (Cornell). Awards include fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a member of the Modern Language Association, The International Association for the History of Cartography, the Society of Cinema and Media Studies, and the United States Handball Association. Since 2000 he and his spouse, Verena Conley, have been co-masters of Kirkland House. In 2011-12 he will be the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at work on a project titled "Engineering, Poetry, Mapping:  Baroque Literature and Cartography in Early Modern France." In December of 2011 the Université Blaise-Pascal (Clermont-Ferrand, France), is awarding him an honorary doctorate.  

Brad Epps
Professor and former Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures

Epps has published nearly a hundred articles and chapters on modern literature, film, art, architecture, queer theory, and immigration from Spain, Latin America, Catalonia, the United States, and France. He is the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo (Oxford University Press, 1996); Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (with Luis Fernández Cifuentes; Bucknell University Press, 2005); Passing Lines: Immigration and Sexuality (with Bill Johnson-González and Keja Valens; Harvard University Press, 2005); All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (with Despina Kakoudaki: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); a special issue of Catalan Review on Barcelona and modernity, and a special issue of GLQ (with Jonathan Katz) on lesbian theorist Monique Wittig. He has taught as visiting professor or scholar in Spain (Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Madrid), Germany, France, Chile, Cuba, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the People’s Republic of China. He is fitfully preparing two books: The Ethics of Promiscuity, on cultural mixings in Latin America and Spain, and Barcelona and Cinema. Another book, co-edited with Humberto Delgado, on Ibero-American cinema, El cine como historia; la historia como cine is forthcoming from Colihue in Buenos Aires.

Peter Galison
Joseph Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics

Galison's work explores the complex interaction between the three principal subcultures of physics — experimentation, instrumentation, and theory. His books include: How Experiments End (University of Chicago Press, 1987), Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (University of Chicago Press, 1997), Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time (W. W. Norton & Company, 2003) and, with Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (2007), and (among others) the co-edited Architecture of Science (MIT Press, 1999), Picturing Science, Producing Art (Routledge, 1998), Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science (Routledge, 2002), and Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture (Princeton University Press, 2008). He has made two documentary films: Ultimate Weapon: The H-bomb Dilemma (2000), and Secrecy (about national security secrecy and democracy), which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008.  At present he is completing a book, Building Crashing Thinking (on technologies that re-form the self) and has just begun a new documentary film project (with Robb Moss) on the long-term storage of nuclear waste.

David Rodowick
William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies
Chair, Department of Visual and Environmental Studies
Interim Director, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Rodowick is the author of numerous essays as well as five books: The Virtual Life of Film (Harvard University Press, 2007); Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (Duke University Press, 2001); Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine (Duke University Press, 1997); The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference, and Film Theory (Routledge, 1991); and The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (University of Illinois Press, 1989; 2nd edition, University of California Press, 1994). His edited collection, Afterimages of Gilles Deleuze's Film Philosophy, was published by University of Minnesota Press in 2009. Having taught at Yale University until 1991, Rodowick began the film studies program there. After studying cinema and comparative literature at the University of Texas, Austin, and Université de Paris 3, he obtained a PhD at the University of Iowa in 1983. Rodowick subsequently taught at the University of Rochester and at King's College, University of London, where he founded the film studies program and the Film Study Center. Special research interests include aesthetics and the philosophy of art, the history of film theory, philosophical approaches to contemporary art and culture, and the impact of new technologies on contemporary society. Rodowick has also been an award-winning experimental filmmaker and video artist. In 2002, he was named an Academy Film Scholar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Rodowick's essay, " An Elegy for Theory," received the Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2009. In spring 2010, he was a Fellow at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie at the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany.

Amie Siegel
Assistant Professor of Visual and Environmental Studies

Born in 1974 in Chicago, Siegel studied at Bard College and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has lived and worked in New York and Berlin. Siegel works variously in 16 and 35 mm film, video, sound, and writing. Screenings and exhibitions include the 2008 Whitney Biennial; KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin; Austrian Film Museum; Berlin International Film Festival; Pacific Film Archive; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Frankfurt Film Museum; and Film Forum in New York. Her first book of poetry, The Waking Life (North Atlantic Books), was published in 1999, followed by numerous essays on art and poetics. Siegel has been an artist-in-residence of the DAAD Berliner-Künstlerprogramm and is a recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Siegel uses the cinematic image as material means to a conceptual end. Her work mines the voyeuristic gaze, direct address, and interview, investigating how these repetitions form cultural memory. Her multichannel video and film installations reformulate cinematic enterprises – the establishing shot, the remake and the tracking shot – as uncanny reflections on absence, historical disorientation and nostalgia. Longer single-channel videos and films (The Sleepers, Empathy, DDR/DDR) move between scripted and spontaneous spaces, truth and fiction, shifting performance from identification to parody and estrangement.

Justin Weir
Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Weir received his BA in 1991 from the University of Minnesota and his PhD in 1997 from Northwestern University. His interests include 19th- and 20th-century Russian prose, 20th-century Russian film, and literary theory. His publications include: Eight Twentieth-Century Russian Plays, ed. and trans. with Timothy Langen (Northwestern University Press, 2000), The Author as Hero (Northwestern University Press, 2002), Leo Tolstoy and the Alibi of Narrative (Yale University Press, 2010).