SCOTT CURTIS
(Associate Professor of Radio/Television/Film) studies the history of film, especially early and silent-era cinema. His work concentrates on the appropriation of motion pictures by other disciplines, such as the scientific and medical use of moving image technology as a research tool or diagnostic instrument. His forthcoming book, Managing Modernity: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (Columbia University Press) reflects this interest in the interaction between film and other institutions. Before joining the faculty at Northwestern, he worked as the Research Archivist for the Special Collections Department of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library. He is also the director of the Northwestern Film Forum, a co-chair of Chicago Film Seminar, and the founder of Block Cinema.
JEN LIGHT 
(Assistant Professor of Communication Studies/History/Sociology) works on historical and contemporary issues raised by the intersections between new technologies and urban life. She is the author of From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Johns Hopkins University Press), and articles appearing in Technology and Culture; Gender, Place, and Culture; Ecumene; Environment and Planning D: Society and Space; Journal of the American Planning Association, and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Light’s recent research has been awarded grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Haynes Foundation/ Historical Society of Southern California. She serves as Consulting Editor to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Annals of the History of Computing, and on the Steering Committee of the Newberry Library’s Seminar on Technology, Politics, and Culture. She is currently at work on Programming the City: Computer Programs and Urban Programs from Punch Cards to SimCity, a history of urban simulations under contract to Johns Hopkins University Press.
HAMID NAFICY
(John Evans Professor of Communications [Radio/Television/Film]) received his Master of Fine Arts degree from UCLA in film and television production and his Ph.D. from UCLA in critical studies of film and television. He has produced many educational films and experimental videos and has published extensively about theories of exile and displacement, exilic and diaspora cinema and media, and Iranian and Third World cinemas. His many publications include such well-known titles as An Accented Cinema, The Making of Exile Cultures, Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged, Iran Media Index, and the AFI anthology, Home, Exile, Homeland.
JEFFREY SCONCE 
(Associate Professor of Radio/Television/Film) is the author of Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Duke University Press), selected by Choice as an Outstanding Title in the Humanities for 2000. His work on film, television, and popular culture has appeared in numerous anthologies, and in such journals as Screen, Wide Angle, the International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Film Quarterly. His essays have been reprinted in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen’s Film Theory and Criticism and the Norton Critical Edition of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. His next book project, Whatever: The Politics and Poetics of Irony focuses on irony, disaffection, and the fragmentation of taste cultures in contemporary film and television. He is also writing a textbook on television aesthetics for Oxford University Press and editing the anthology, Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics.
LYNN SPIGEL 
(Frances Willard Professor of Screen Cultures) is the author of Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Duke University Press) and Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press). She is currently writing High and Low TV: Modern Art and Commercial Television, 1950-1970 and conducting a new research project on new media, architecture, and smart homes She is co-editor of Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Duke University Press), Feminist Television Criticism (Oxford), The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict (Routledge) Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (University of Minnesota Press) and Close Encounters: Film, Feminism and Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press). She has given talks internationally at numerous museums and universities and is the editor of the Console-ing Passions book series at Duke University Press. Her specialities include media and US cultural history, gender and media, and cultural theory. She teaches courses on television history, film and television genre, media theory, feminist media studies, cultural theory, and historical research methods.
JACQUELINE STEWART 
(Associate Professor of of Radio/Television/Film) is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (University of California Press, 2005), which explores African American images, spectatorship and filmmaking practices up to 1920. Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Film Quarterly, The Moving Image and American Cinema’s Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, eds. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Her research and teaching focus on African American film and literature, American silent film, histories and theories of spectatorship, and the role of race in “orphan films” (non-commercial and other marginalized film and video works in need of preservation, from home movies to cable access television programs). She is currently working on studies of the life and work of African American actor/writer/director Spencer Williams, and the South Side Home Movie Project.
SAMUEL WEBER 
(Avalon Professor of German) is the author of Institution and Interpretation (Stanford University Press), The Legend of Freud (University of Minnesota Press), and Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge University Press). His collection of essays, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Power Publications), interrogates the concept of “mediality,” analyzing in detail and putting to contemporary use both Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on “The Artwork in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility” and Martin Heidegger’s “The Question of Technology.” Working in various countries and with a variety of media, he has also brought his critical practice to theatrical and operatic productions and has, in reverse, brought his experience with the dynamics of theater into the heart of his critical reflection on literature, psychoanalysis, and politics. This dialogue is evident in his current interest in problems of theatricality and Walter Benjamin, work that will appear in his forthcoming book, Theatricality as Medium (Fordham UP). In addition to his own body of work, he has also translated significant work by Jacques Derrida and Theodor Adorno, as well as co-editing the anthology, Religion and Media (Stanford University Press).
MIMI WHITE 
(Professor of Radio/Television/Film) teaches film, television, and popular culture with a focus on feminist theory on feminist theory and media historiography. She is the author of Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television (University of North Carolina Press). In addition, her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and in such journals as Screen, Camera Obscura, and Film and History. She has also been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki and the University of Tampere, as well as a Visiting Professor at the University of Jyvaskyla. In 2004-05 she was the Bicentennial Professor in American Studies at the University of Helsinki.
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Participating Faculty
SCOTT DURHAM 
(Associate Professor of Comparative Literature/French) is a specialist in 20th century literature, film, and theory. He is the author of Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford University Press, 1998) as well as the editor of a Yale French Studies issue on Jean Genet. His current book, provisionally entitled After Deleuze: The Art of the Event, explores the possibilities and limits of Deleuze’s thought for the interpretation and contestation of postmodern culture. Among the works discussed are films by Marker, Godard, Ruiz, and Amelio and novels by Proust, Genet, Djebar and DeLillo.
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BRIAN T. EDWARDS
(Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies) teaches and writes about twentieth-century American literature and culture in its international context; fields of interest include American studies, cultural and diaspora studies, colonial and postcolonial discourse, film, and globalization. A former Fulbright Fellow to Morocco, he also specializes in Maghrebi literature and culture, especially in its intersections with United States culture and politics. He has taught courses on comparative orientalisms, cold war culture, representations of World War II, (dis)locations of American national identity, globalization, circulation, and diaspora. Edwards had published essays on Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Frantz Fanon, Mohammed Mrabet, the encounter of American Studies and postcolonial studies, and 1950s Hollywood Orientalism. His first book, Morocco Bound: Disorienting America's Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, will be published by Duke UP in September 2005.
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HANNAH FELDMAN
(Assistant Professor of Art History) teaches courses on modern and contemporary art and visual culture, including film, television, and emergent media. Her essays and reviews have been published in Artforum, October, Art Journal, Contemporary, World Art, and caa.reviews. Currently, she is completing Art During War: Visible Space and the Aesthetics of Action, Paris 1956/2006, a book that explores public space and image-making in relationship to problems of national identity during and after the Algerian War for Independence. She has worked as an Associate Producer for an independent Chicago film production and has curated an exhibition of contemporary art and video at The Whitney Museum of American Art entitled The Subject of Rape.
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DILIP GAONKAR 
(Associate Professor of Communication Studies/Rhetoric) teaches courses in rhetorical theory and cultural studies. He is the Director of the Center for Global Culture and Communication, an initiative of Northwestern University’s School of Communication. He is also the Co-Director of the Center for Transcultural Studies, a Chicago-based international network of scholars and cultural practitioners, as well as an Associate editor of Public Culture. His research interests include rhetoric and the human sciences, the relationship between rhetoric and literary/cultural theory, and globalization of culture and communication.
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ROBERT HARIMAN 
(Professor of Communication Studies/Rhetoric) joined the Northwestern faculty in the fall of 2004 and teaches courses in rhetorical theory and the analysis of public culture. His book Political Style: The Artistry of Power (University of Chicago Press) analyzes the play of social and aesthetic designs in political action. More recent work includes a forthcoming co-authored volume, Icons of Liberal Democracy: Public Culture in the Age of Photojournalism, which examines how iconic photographs shape public identity.
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STEFANIE HARRIS
(Assistant Professor: German/Comparative Literature) teaches interdisciplinary approaches to literature and media, Post-war German and American literature, Media theory, critical theory, and postmodernism. Her forthcoming book, Technologies of Representation: Literature and Media, 1895-1930, examines the response of early-twentieth century German and American literary figures to emerging media and technologies in optical and acoustic recording. Her work has also appeared in German Quarterly, Translation Perspectives, and parapluie. She has also produced translations of essays in Multi Story Car Park: Photographs by Igor Mischiyev and Literature, Media, Information Systems. Essays by Friedrich A. Kittler. She is currently working on a book on the interrogation of photography in post-war German literature.
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E. PATRICK JOHNSON 
(Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Performance Studies) works on black gay vernacular traditions, performance ethnography, queer performance, and sexuality studies. As a scholar/artist, Johnson has toured his one-man show, Strange Fruit, around the country since 1999, and published the script in TDR. He is the author of Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Duke University Press) and a co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Black Queer Theory: A Critical Introduction. His next projects include an oral history of black gay men in the South and a collection of auto-ethnographic essays.
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LAURA KIPNIS
(Professor in Radio/Television/Film) is a cultural theorist and former video artist whose work has appeared in a number of academic and popular contexts. She has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. She is the author of Ecstasy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender & Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press), Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (Duke University Press), and Against Love: A Polemic (Pantheon). Her essays and reviews have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Social Text, Wide Angle, the Village Voice, Harper’s, Slate, and the New York Times Magazine. Her video essays have been screened and broadcast in North America, (Museum of Modern Art, American Film Institute, Whitney Museum-Equitable Center, et al), Europe, Japan, and Australia, and are distributed by Video Data Bank, Electronic Arts Intermix, Cinema Guild, and V/Tape in Canada. Her current work focuses on the intersections of (American) politics, body, and psyche, with detours through aesthetics, love, Marx, adultery, scandal, Freud, pornography, and the legacy of the avant garde.
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CHUCK KLEINHANS 
(Associate Professor of Radio/Television/Film) has published extensively on independent film and video, experimental cinema, documentary, film history, film theory, and cultural theory. His work on sexual representation examines sexual imagery in visual communications ranging from high art to kitsch, advertising to pornography. Co-editor of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, he has also made films and videos. His current research centers on institutional analysis of experimental cinema, the ideology of race and gender in contemporary Hollywood, and the politics of paracinema.
LANE RELYEA
(Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Practice) has published essays and reviews in numerous magazines including Artforum, Parkett, Frieze, Art in America and New Art Examiner. He has also written recent monographs on Polly Apfelbaum, Richard Artschwager, Jeremy Blake, Vija Clemins, Toba Khedoori and Monique Prieto among others, and contributed to such exhibition catalogs as Public Offerings (2001) and Helter Skelter (1992), both for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. From 1987 to 1991 he served as editor of Artpaper, a monthly art magazine based in Minneapolis. After teaching for a decade at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, where he joined the faculty in 1991, in the summer of 2001 he was appointed director of the Core Program and Art History at the Glassell School of Art in Houston, Texas.
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CLAUDIA SWAN 
(Associate Professor of Art History) studies the relationships between early modern art and science and the history of the imagination; the focus of her research is early modern Dutch visual culture. She is the author of Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland (Cambridge University Press) and has also published The Clutius Botanical Watercolors (Harry N. Abrams). She is the co-editor of Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World (University of Pennsylvania Press) and Interior Temptation: A Brief History of the Early Modern Imagination (forthcoming). She has been a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1998-1999) and a fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin (2002), where she will lead a summer seminar in 2004 on “Science on Screen.” She has published numerous articles on Dutch visual culture, and is a founding Director of Northwestern’s Program in the Study of Imagination. She is currently working on a book on The Aesthetics of Possession. Art, Science, and Collecting in the Netherlands 1600-1650.
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ALEXANDER WEHELIYE
(Assistant Professor of English and African-American Studies) teaches African American and Afro-Diasporic literature and culture, Critical Theory, and Cultural Studies. His book, Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity (forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2005), explores sound recording and reproduction and its impact on twentieth-century black culture, including literary, musical and cinematic art. His work has been published in Amerikastudien/American Studies, boundary 2, CR: The New Centennial Review, and Social Text.
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HARVEY YOUNG
(Assistant Professor of Theater) most recent publications include an article on playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and performance artist Robbie McCauley and a series of book and performance reviews for Theatre Journal. He is currently revising the manuscript for his first book, Still Standing: Embodied Experience and Race Performance in the Diaspora. Prior to joining the Theatre faculty at Northwestern, Dr. Young taught courses in film history and film analysis at Ithaca College and the University at Buffalo. His current research centers on how "race" is performed, in a non-theatrical sense, across bodies.
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