"Rethinking National Cinemas"
Anne Ciecko and Patrick Mensah
Tuesday, 02 October at 5.30 PM in Herter 301

Anne Ciecko <ciecko@comm.umass.edu> joined the Communication department as Assistant Professor in fall 1999. She has taught undergraduate courses including Contemporary World Cinema, the International Film Star, International Women Filmmakers, Asian Pop Cinema, and Art and Community; and graduate seminars on Film Theory and Criticism, Film Cultures and Communities, and Feminist Film Theory. In spring 2002, she is offering a graduate seminar in Gender and Intercultural Film/Video (COMM 593C). She has published writings on cinema in a variety of journals and anthologies including Cinema Journal, Jump Cut, Journal of Film and Video, Spectator, Postscript, Velvet Light Trap, Asian Cinemas, Film/Literature Quarterly, Afterimage, Transnational Chinese Cinemas (Hawaii, 1997), and Bataille's Eye (Distributed Art Publishers, 1997). She has articles forthcoming in the Asian Journal of Communication and an anthology titled Contemporary Directors. She is completing an essay dealing with recent blockbusters from South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines—part of an ongoing research, and hopefully, book project. She has also edited a special issue of Quarterly Review of Film and Video on the global film star, which will be out in January 2002.

Patrick Mensah <pmensah@frital.umass.edu> earned his doctorate at Cornell University where he wrote his dissertation on "The Politics of Masquerade: On the Ethical and Epistemological Dilemmas and Debts of Theatrical Language in Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Rousseau, and Contemporary Thought." He is associate professor in the Department of French and Italian Studies. His research interests include enlightenment studies, critical theory, cultural theory, and post-colonial discourses. He has taught courses and supervised independent studies on postcolonial theory, contemporary critical theory, Francophone African film, Caribbean women’s writing., ‘love and sex’ in French culture, critical and textual analysis, to name a few. He is the translator of Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, published by Stanford University Press, 1998.

Copies of all readings have been placed on reserve on the third floor of the DuBois Library under COMPLIT 595A: Seminar–Cultural Studies.

Arjun Appadurai, "Global Ethnoscapes," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, USA: Minnesota, 1996): 48–65.

Anne Ciecko, "Superhit Hunk Heroes for Sale: Globalization and Bollywood’s Gender Politics," Asian Journal of Communication (forthcoming).

Franco Moretti, "Planet Hollywood," New Left Review (May–June 2001): 90–101.

This event is sponsored by Department of Comparative Literature-UMass, Program in Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC)-UMass, Department of French and Italian Studies-UMass, Department of Communication-UMass, Department of Legal Studies-UMass, Department of English and Comparative Literature-Smith, Interdepartmental Program in Film Studies-UMass, Department of English-UMass, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures-UMass,  Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies-UMass, Department of Film Studies, Mt. Holyoke College.

For further information, please contact Anita Mannur, Beverly Weber, Craig Sinclair, and Dale Hudson at opdics@yahoo.com or visit our web site at www.umass.edu/complit/ogscl/culturalstudies/