Cinema and Media Studies
The goal of Hamilton's Cinema and Media Studies Program is to blend study in film 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, regardless of genre and context, for their structure, approach, goals, social and political implications, and aesthetics
- Apply knowledge of the overall development and history of cinema and moving-image 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 moving-image 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. (Social, Structural, and Institutional Hierarchies.) Day Moore.
Explore these select courses:
Meet Our Faculty
film history; documentary, experimental and avant-garde film; cinema and place; institutional histories of organizations that have served independent film; 20th century American literature
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
history of photography; modern and contemporary visual culture; media studies; digital humanities
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
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)
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
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 Interviews Filmmaker Penny Lane
“You Want Me to Watch Listening to Kenny G!!!?: An Interview with Penny Lane,” by Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald, was published as a web exclusive in the current issue of Cineaste magazine.
Alvarez ’22 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?’”
Mendelson ’22 Honors Pandemic Victims Through Video
It was a pretty great winter-break job for a student of cinema: A Chicago musician hired Devin Mendelson ’22 to create videos for a website that remembers victims of the pandemic. As it turned out, his work was widely viewed.
Careers After Hamilton
Hamilton graduates who concentrated in cinema and media studies are pursuing careers in a variety of fields, including:
- Motion Picture Prop Master
- Video Editor/Producer, Sports Illustrated
- Web Designer/Developer
- Manager, Showtime Cinemas
Explore Our Spaces
The Kirner-Johnson Building, also known as KJ, houses the offices for faculty members in cinema and media studies. The building features an atrium, team rooms for working on group projects, and five case-method classrooms with the latest technology to support teaching and learning.
Contact
Department Name
Cinema and Media Studies Program
Contact Name
Pavitra Sundar, Program Director
Clinton, NY 13323
