On July 1 the leadership of Film and Media Studies was passed from Adam Rodgers to Meredith Ward and Kyle Stine.  Meredith will be serving for a second time as Director of Film and Media Studies, and Kyle Stine will be the inaugural Associate Director and DUS of Film and Media Studies.  

Meredith Ward is the author of Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture, which was published in 2019 by University of California Press and was a finalist for the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology. Her work has been published in various publications, including Nineteenth Century Film and Literature, Music and the Moving Image, Sound Effects, the Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening, and The Oxford Handbook of Media and Vocality. She is currently at work on a book on representations of female genius in twenty-first century television and film. She is the founder/designer of Studio North, JHU’s student-run film production company that funds prestigious student projects, which has funded twenty-three projects and celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024. She is a multi-time finalist for JHU’s Excellence in Teaching Awards, and won the Undergraduate Advising Award in 2020. For the past three years, she has served as Dean’s Fellow for Undergraduate Mentorship for the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, helping to imagine new models of mentorship within the Krieger School. 

Kyle Stine is a scholar of cinema and technology, whose research focuses on the limits of imaging, whether in extreme durational cinema or in the microscopically dense arrays of integrated circuits. He has held fellowships with Mellon/ACLS, Media@McGill at McGill University, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. He is the recipient of a Teaching Innovation Grant from JHU’s Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation, which he used to build out his podcasting course, and continues to develop courses on new media. His writings have appeared in a broad range of journals on film, media, art, and technology, including Critical Inquiry, Discourse, Grey Room, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, October, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. He is co-editor of Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time: Essays on Hardwired Temporalities (Amsterdam University Press, 2021).