Alice O Lovejoy
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, Raw Material: Cinema, War Economy, and the Early Cold War, spans the years 1939 to 1947. The book examines the intersections between cinema and war economy through a material history of raw film stock, of which there was a worldwide shortage in this period, and describes how the stock shortage entwined with 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.