Summer 2020 Newsletter
Dear Alumni and Friends,
These are challenging times.
The COVID-19 pandemic required implementing and adjusting to remote teaching and learning. The killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis cast a spotlight on racial injustice in its many forms. Both events have disrupted business as usual at the University. CSCL faculty, students, and staff are responding with resourcefulness, conviction, and care.
Our instructors created meaningful learning opportunities in new modalities on short notice and found ways to discuss the historical, cultural, and political dynamics of the pandemic as it was unfolding. Our fall 2020 curriculum will explore these topics in depth: Professor Cesare Casarino is teaching Representation in the Time of Pandemics: Culture and Politics from AIDS to COVID-19 as a new freshman seminar, and Associate Professor Maggie Hennefeld will teach an upper-level special-topics course entitled Media Madness: Hysteria, Anxiety, and Contagion.
Demonstrating our commitment to leading discussions of the power of culture in the modern world, several CSCL department members also published timely responses to recent events. Graduate students Alya Ansari and Mitch Hernandez co-authored an essay on the labor conditions laid bare by the pandemic; Maggie Hennefeld recalled silent cinema's response to earlier pandemics for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I wrote about the cancellation of the TV show COPS and the role of reality television in racialized police violence in Minneapolis and elsewhere for Film Quarterly’s online column Quorum. Looking to fall, the department is preparing to host a town hall on anti-racism as well as a graduate student-organized event on racial justice in the University and beyond.
While this has been a unique semester to be sure, the caliber of our award-winning students remains the same. This year CSCL graduate students were the recipients of competitive University and collegiate doctoral dissertation fellowships, the Harold Leonard Memorial Fellowship in Film, the Voices of Vienna fellowship, and other notable awards. We also celebrated the accomplishments of our talented undergraduate students, including a Fulbright fellowship recipient and the winners of the department’s inaugural CSCL undergraduate essay contest.
I hope you enjoy the following news stories about the CSCL community. We hope you will also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
Please take care during these extraordinary times,
Laurie Ouellette
Department Chair
“The amount of wonderful, independent, experimental animation made by women is immense!” PhD candidate Vanessa Cambier has dedicated her dissertation to spreading awareness about female animators and their experimental films.
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed everyone’s daily routines, and life at the University is no different. Read about how professors in the Department of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature have adapted their courses to look at the pandemic through the lens of cultural studies.
