Department of Film & Media UC Berkeley

Bio

Robert Alford’s dissertation, “’To Know the Words to the Music’: Spatial Circulation, Queer Discourse and the Musical,” historicizes the relationship between homosexuals and musicals, and theorizes how popular song enabled forms of spatial and linguistic mobility that allowed queers to pass as normative subjects. His interests beyond film theory and history include queer theory, new media theory, theories of sound and the voice, sociolinguistics, ethnomusicology and phenomenology. Robert has published in Screen and Qui Parle, and has an article forthcoming in Cultural Critique.

Bio

Nicholas Baer received his PhD in Film & Media from UC Berkeley in 2015, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. Currently, he is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at the University of Groningen. Before moving to the Netherlands, he was Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. His research examines film and contemporary digital media in relation to broader aesthetic, cultural, and philosophical debates of the modern era.

In his forthcoming monograph, Historical Turns: Weimar Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism, Baer places films of the Weimar Republic in conversation with the “crisis of historicism” that was widely diagnosed by German intellectuals in the interwar period. The project challenges the historicist tenets of New Film History and expands the field of media philosophy, probing the nexus between moving-image culture and historical-philosophical inquiry. Baer’s research has been supported through yearlong fellowships from the Fulbright Program, German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and Leo Baeck Institute / Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. His work on the project was also recognized with the 2015 Karsten Witte Prize for best essay of the year from the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (Society for Media Studies).

Baer has co-edited two volumes of film and media theory: the multi-award-winning The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016) and Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019). He has published in journals such as Cinéma & Cie, Film Quarterly, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Seminar, and October, and his writings have been translated into six languages.

For a list of his publications, please click here.

Bio

Eliot Bessette received his Ph.D. in 2020. His dissertation, “Thinking Through Fear in Film and Haunts,” advances a new form of philosophically productive close readings of the emotion of fear, as elicited by horror cinema and immersive theatrical haunted house attractions, or “haunts.” His research has appeared or is forthcoming in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, and ReFocus: The Films of William Castle (Edinburgh University Press). He has also written reviews and analyses of haunts for a popular audience at Haunting.net. He received an MA in Cinema and Media Studies from UCLA and an AB in Cinema and Media Studies and English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago.

Bio

Jennifer Blaylock (PhD 2019) is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow/Visiting Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies at Oberlin College. She is currently working on her book project, Making Media New: Race in African Media History, a postcolonial media archaeology that analyzes the history of discourse about new media technologies in Africa from the early twentieth century to the present. Her research has appeared in Screen, Feminist Media Histories, boundary 2, and the Journal of African Cinemas. In addition to her PhD in Film & Media Studies, Jennifer holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and a BA in Anthropology from University of California, Berkeley. Her research has been funded by US Fulbright, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California.

Bio

Alex Bush is a PhD candidate in Film & Media and a 2017-18 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellow. Her dissertation, “Cold Storage: A Media History of the Glacier,” examines the role played by visual and communications media in bringing nature into a Western mode of historical thought. She has authored articles forthcoming in Cinema Journal and in the collection Unwatchable (ed. Baer, Hennefeld, Horak & Iversen). At Berkeley, she has co-organized conferences on seriality and on expanded notions of media, and worked as chief translator for the sourcebook The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907-1933, (UC Press, 2016). She holds a M.A. in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California, and an A.B. in Literature from Harvard University. 

Bio

Patrick Ellis is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Tampa. He is a historian of film and media, with a special interest in how these subjects interact with the histories of cartography, medicine, science and technology. He is the author of Aeroscopics: Media of the Bird’s-Eye View (University of California Press, 2021).

 

Bio

Tung-Hui Hu is a writer and a scholar of digital culture. He earned his PhD in Rhetoric – Film Studies at UC Berkeley in 2009 and joined the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor later that year. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan and a faculty member in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, 

As an academic, Hu is the author of A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015), which The New Yorker described as “mesmerizing… absorbing [in] its playful speculations.” His new book, Digital Lethargy is forthcoming in 2022. His research has been featured on CBS News, BBC Radio 4, Boston Globe, New Scientist, and Art in America, among other venues. As a poet and essayist, Hu has published three collections of poetry, most recently Greenhouses, Lighthouses (Copper Canyon Press, 2013); his poems appear in places such as The New Republic, Ploughshares, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Hu has been awarded the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, and literature fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the San Francisco Foundation. He is a member of the editorial board of Afterimage.