Alice O Lovejoy
Contact Me
alovejoy@umn.edu
612-624-8099
Cultural Stdy/Comparative Lit .
235C Nicholson Hall
216 Pillsbury Dr SE
Alice Lovejoy is a film, media, and cultural historian whose research examines governmental and institutional media cultures in transnational perspective. Her first book, Army Film and the Avant Garde: Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military (Indiana University Press, 2015), was named co-winner of the Modern Language Association’s 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Slavic Languages and Literatures. It was also awarded Honorable Mention for the 2016 University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies (ASEEES) and the 2017 Czechoslovak Studies Association Book Prize, and longlisted for the 2016 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. This book traces the emergence of an experimental film culture in the Czechoslovak Army’s film studio (1929-1969), and includes a DVD of thirteen short films produced by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense.
Lovejoy is currently working on two book projects. The first, Tales of Militant Chemistry: A History of Raw Film Stock, examines the intersections between media and war economy between 1938 and 1948 through a material history of raw film stock, of which there was a worldwide shortage in this period. Following stock and its components between the United States, Germany, Britain, Western and Eastern Europe, and Francophone African colonies, the book describes how the shortage entwined with the period’s geopolitics, including the beginnings of the Cold War. The second project studies the intertwined histories of a series of postwar children’s television and film institutions—among them, Iran’s Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon), East Germany’s National Center for Children’s Film and Television, Czechoslovakia’s Center for Films for Children and Youth, and UNESCO’s International Centre for Films for Children and Young People. With Mari Pajala, she is also editing a volume entitled Remapping Cold War Media: Institutions, Infrastructures, Networks, Exchanges.
Lovejoy’s research has been supported by, among others, an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) postdoctoral fellowship, a Fulbright-Hays DDRA Fellowship, two Fulbright fellowships, and the University of Minnesota's McKnight-Land Grant Professorship. She has also worked as a film critic, curator, and filmmaker, including as an editor at Film Comment magazine.