Cinema and Media Studies
The goal of Hamilton's Cinema and Media Studies Program is to blend study in film and media history and theory while providing students opportunities to pursue their own artistic visions through the uses of new technology.
About the Major
Hamilton’s Cinema and Media Studies Program explores the motion picture as an art form, a multifaceted history, and as an “intellectual nexus”—a way of thinking about the world across boundaries. Courses examine crucial contributions to the history of cinema and media from across the globe and reveal how nationality, economic realities, religion, ethnicity, gender, the natural environment, and other social and physical forces are represented within popular, independent, and avant-garde media. Many students put their learning to use in various creative ways, both on and off campus.
Students Will Learn To:
- Analyze films and other media, regardless of genre, context, language, and geographical origin, for their structure, approach, goals, social and political implications, and aesthetics
- Apply knowledge of the overall development and history of cinema and media, from a global perspective, in written and spoken work
- Produce creative work in forms employed in cinema and media studies
- Demonstrate knowledge of contexts, outside of the specific focus of media, within which cinema and media studies play a role
A Sampling of Courses
Broadcasting Freedom: Protest, Power, and Black Media
Introduces the media’s role (including print, radio, television, and digital) in defining Black freedom movements, including Garveyism, Pan-Africanism, the Harlem Renaissance, negritude, the Civil Rights movement, and Black Power. Traces the transformation of the political landscape (and soundscape) through radio, television, and digital media, and their role in broadcasting the Black freedom movement for audiences in the United States and beyond.
Explore these select courses:
Meet Our Faculty
Pavitra Sundar
Associate Professor of Literature, Director of Cinema and Media Studies
cultural politics of voice; postcolonial studies; sound studies; South Asian film and media studies; feminist theory, especially women-of-color and transnational feminisms
Intersections of film, literature, and painting in Italian culture; Neorealism and Italian art cinema; women writers and filmmakers; Italian feminist thought; linguistic diversity; translation; adaptation; Mediterranean visual culture; transnational Italian studies
History of photography; photojournalism and news media; modern and contemporary visual culture; media studies; digital humanities; World War II and the Holocaust; Jewish Studies
American philosophy; the problem of skepticism; contemporary Anglo-American philosophy; environmental ethics
video, performance, installation, photography, electronic media, and history and contemporary practices in each of those areas
Martine Guyot-Bender
Christian A. Johnson Excellence in Teaching Award Professor of French and Francophone Studies
French 20th- and 21st-century literature and film; narrative representation of trauma (war, poverty); social documentary from the 1970s to today; literature and film of the Nazi occupation of France (Patrick Modiano); women writers (Amélie Nothomb, Assia Djebar, Simone de Beauvoir)
Lydia Hamessley
John and Anne Fischer Professor in Fine Arts, Acting Chair of Music
Dolly Parton; American folk and traditional musics; banjo, music and film; medieval and renaissance music; music and gender
photography, history of photography, video capture and editing, Adobe premiere, art foundations curriculum, and 2D and 4D fundamentals
film history; documentary, experimental and avant-garde film; cinema and place; institutional histories of organizations that have served independent film; 20th century American literature
African-American history; diasporic and transnational history; race and empire in 20th-century U.S. and France
modern Japanese literature, especially modernism and youth magazine culture; early 20th-century media, especially cinema and radio; and censorship and the Occupation Era, 1945-52
Baruch Spinoza, Moses Maimonides, neuroethics, and Jewish studies
Hispanic cinema, contemporary Hispanic Caribbean literature and culture, and Cuban studies
religion and media, religion and popular culture, comparative religions, blasphemy and controversial art, religious life in the U.S.
Chinese cinema and literature
Explore Hamilton Stories
MacDonald Featured in Cineaste
Professor of Cinema and Media Studies Scott MacDonald was profiled as the “preeminent scholar of experimental cinema” in the winter issue of Cineaste.
Alvarez Honing Career Skills in Dartmouth Bridge Program
For many Hamilton students, a trip to the Howard Diner delivers little more than a late-night meal. But for Yenesis Alvarez ’22, it provided an unexpected academic opportunity. “I remember [during] my freshman year,” she recalled, “this random guy at the diner came up to me and was like, ‘Hey, do you want to learn about our business program?’”
Four years ago, Jason Le ’23 might not have believed it if you told him that he would one day attend film school. As a first-year student, Le intended to major in biology on a pre-med track.
Contact
Department Name
Cinema and Media Studies Program
Contact Name
Pavitra Sundar, Program Director
Clinton, NY 13323
