Villarejo heads to London for Kovacs book award

Villarejo

By Franklin Crawford

Amy Villarejo, Cornell associate professor of film studies and feminist and gay studies, has been awarded the 2005 Katherine Singer Kovacs book award for Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire.

The award will be presented at the first plenary session of the 2005 annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), in London, England, on Thursday, March 31. Founded in 1959, SCMS is a professional organization of college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars and others devoted to the study of the moving image. The college and university faculty and students who comprise this scholarly organization are involved in various fields of study, including (but not limited to): film studies, cinema studies, media studies, visual arts, cultural studies, film and media history and moving image studies.

"The Kovacs award is a great honor, of course, but it means something special insofar as it's bestowed by the SCMS, the professional organization that has most nurtured my work since I was a graduate student," said Villarejo, who joined the Cornell faculty in 1997 and teaches courses in the history and theory of film, television and popular culture, and feminist and queer theory. Her research has included lesbian and feminist documentary and the intersections between cultural studies and cinema in the collection she edited with Matthew Tinkcom (Keyframes). Her current research focuses on racism and left politics in mid-century American film, television and radio.

Villarejo said Lesbians Rule began as her dissertation and explores the politics of lesbian and gay visibility, particularly through documentary film.

"My research has centered on the slide between two senses of 'representation': the sense of portrait, or having one's likeness produced and disseminated, and the sense of proxy, or achieving political representation in the public sphere," Villarejo said. "I'm interested in how demands for the former are thought, I think too optimistically, to result in successes with the latter."

Villarejo spent a sabbatic year researching another instance of the politics of representation -- in anti-racist popular broadcast media of the mid-20th century in the United States. With support from the Provost's Distinguished Scholarship Award and the Appel Fellowship, she launched a project that attempts, she said, "to open conversations among historians of these different media to follow the politics of anti-racism from the popular front to the blacklist in Hollywood -- a trajectory I want to see from the perspective of 'intermedia,' or the cross-fertilization of several forms of media all at once."

In her work, Villarejo said she is "galvanized by the opportunity to instigate conversations about popular media and media history with students, who are hungry for a critical perspective on media institutions and the maintenance of a vibrant public sphere."

Toward that end, she is writing an introductory volume on film studies for Routledge (Film Studies: The Basics), which she hopes "will also serve as a guide for lifelong viewers of film who are eager for an overview of our field and for some perspective on how to navigate the democratic potential of new media and the digital divide."

During this year's Cornell Summer College, Villarejo will have an opportunity to test the draft of that book in her new course designed for high school students, called On Camera: Studies on Film Analysis.

"Thanks to growing interest at Cornell in film, the course will also be staffed by two graduate student teaching assistants writing dissertations in film, and we'll have Cornell alumni who are working in the field return to present their work to the Summer College students," she said. "It's a wonderful new venture."