The Graduate Student Conference

Since 2008, the Graduate Students have selected a topic around which to organize a two day symposium.  Supported by funds from the Graduate School as well as the Program, the conference has traditionally been the brainchild of students in their second year.  To them goes the task of raising additional funds, advertising a call for papers, selecting a keynote speaker and featured film, and scheduling the event.  Usually occurring in February, the symposium has attracted paper topics submitted by graduate students in film and media studies programs from across the country.  It has been an excellent forum for discussion not just of each year’s topic but of issues in the field that confront all students.  Similarities and differences among programs are carefully noted. And working partnerships among individual students have often formed. 

Past topics of these Spring-term conferences have included:

The Aggressive Image (2018)

Cinemania: Madness and the Moving Image (2016)

Eye Candy: Consuming Moving Images at the Cinema and Beyond (2015)

Fields of Vision: Observation, Surveillance, Voyeurism (2014)

Expanding Cinema: Spatial Dimensions of Film Exhibition, Aesthetics, and Theory (2013)

Auteurs in the 21st Century (2012)

Sensing Cinema: History-Theory-Body-Screen (2011)

Screens, Sounds, Seats (2010)

The Politics of Superheroes (2009)

A Cinema of Affect: Contemporary Korean Cinema (2008)