Masha Shpolberg
Education History
B.A. Slavic Languages & Literatures (Highest Honors), Princeton University, 2010
Certificates in French and Visual Arts
M.A. Film Studies, Université de Paris III – La Nouvelle Sorbonne, 2012
Diplôme de l’Ecole Normale Supérieure, 2013
Research Interests
Eastern European cinema; documentary; digital storytelling practices; the Digital Humanities
Biography
Masha Shpolberg is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature and Film & Media Studies. Her dissertation focuses on the representation of labor in Polish cinema between 1968 and 1989, a time of massive workers’ strikes and opposition to the communist government. Masha is particularly interested in the way that oppositional filmmakers were able to draw on the experiments of the interwar avant-garde in order to deconstruct the vocabulary of Socialist Realism and circumvent censorship.
Masha has taught and co-taught a number of courses at Yale, including “Introduction to Film,” “War on Film,” “Global Hollywood,” and “Documentary Film Workshop.” In addition to the academic publications below, she contributes criticism to Film Quarterly, Tablet, Senses of Cinema, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
Publication
“Intermediality and the Staging of History in Stanisław Wyspiański’s play Wesele (1901) and Andrzej Wajda’s film adaptation (1973),” Forthcoming in The Polish Review in 2019.
“Lindbergh’s Engine: Hollywood’s Transition to Sound and the Aviation Film,” Forthcoming in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television in 2019.
“Beyond Man of Marble: Deconstructing the Shock Worker Myth in Polish Documentary,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 9 (3), 1-18, 2018.
“Baba Yaga sur l’écran soviétique,” Révue Sciences/Lettres, 1 (4), 2016.
“The Roar of Gunfire: Rethinking the Role of Sound in World War II Newsreels,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, 3 (2), 113-129, 2014.
Book Chapter
“The Educational Film Studio and the Cinema of Wojciech Wiszniewski” in Ksenya Gurshtein and Sonja Simonyi (eds.), PostwarExperimental Cinemas in Eastern Europe, Forthcoming from Amsterdam University Press, 2019.