The Media Literacy subdivision in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures is dedicated to the study of evolving cultures 
of literacy—from manuscripts and the material history of the book to 
performance, film, and emerging digital cultures—that each call for 
singular modes of readerly or spectatorial engagement.

The subdivision connects our faculty’s research and teaching in literary and cultural studies to the 
fields of film and media to encompass such areas as film 
history and esthetics, media theory, and performance theory. The 
emergence of new forms of literacy attendant to the material objects and platforms 
through which culture is transmitted requires both a historical
 perspective and appropriate analytic or critical paradigms.

Many 
faculty and students throughout the department ask in their research how different media bring about distinct
 forms of reading, and how interpretive practices can be at one and the same time the stimulus
 for cultural change and the expression of that change.

People

William Egginton’s contribution to the field of media literacy has been focused on the importance for cultural and intellectual history of the rise of the great theatrical institutions in early modern Europe. His widely cited theory of theatricality posits the stage as a fundamental medium for the transmission of ideas, which contributed to structuring a way of conceiving of and inhabiting space peculiar to modernity. The theatricality theory paved the way for his more recent work on media practices from printed fiction to cinema to reality TV, spanning historical periods from the early modern period to the present time.

Earle Havens holds a dual PhD in history and Renaissance from Yale University, where he focused on the history of the book and the material culture of texts and allied media, from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance. His current book projects focus on 16th-century illicit printing, book smuggling, and scribal publication in the post-Tridentine Catholic underground; the history of literary forgery (with Walter Stephens); and the Renaissance album amicorum tradition. He is also the principal investigator of an international digital humanities grant project in collaboration with Lisa Jardine (University College London) and Anthony Grafton (Princeton). The four-year Mellon-funded project “Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe” will digitize, fully transcribe, and tag in machine-readable form the dense marginal manuscript annotations left in printed books by learned readers. Transcriptions and digital images will be adapted to a web-based viewer to facilitate user interface with these complex, composite textual sources, allowing for the examination of strategies and traditions of reading in the century following the Printing Revolution. For more information, see: www.bookwheel.org.

Derek Schilling works in the fields of French literary and film studies. At Hopkins he has taught seminars on theories of cinema (“Film Theory and Critical Methods”), screen temporalities (“Time and Narrative in French Fiction Films”), and transcultural film history (“Franco-Algerian Screens”). In Eric Rohmer (Manchester UP, 2007) he explored how the acclaimed director translates André Bazin’s ontological realist legacy into a highly controlled yet luminous vision of mise en scène that privileges the human voice while respecting the integrity of the lived world. Among other projects in film and media are a trilogy of articles on French films from the early 1970s (René Vautier, Yves Boisset, and Laurent Heynemann) that were among the first to address head-on the legacy of the Algerian War of Independence, and the multi-author volume, co-edited with Philippe Met, Screening the Paris Suburbs Before the banlieue Film. This project draws on theories of spatiality, the history of urbanization and on both auteurist and genre-based approaches to film history to uncover the long history of the French suburbs on screen.

Bernadette Wegenstein is an Austrian-born linguist, author and critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker living in Baltimore. Her work brings together her feminist thought and her interest in human-centric storytelling. She studied semiotics with Umberto Eco at the University of Bologna and received her doctorate in linguistics from Vienna University. As a post-doctoral fellow, she studied comparative literature and film at Stanford University. At Hopkins shedirects the Center of Advanced Media Study, and is a professor of Media Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

She is the author of several books in the field of media studies, including two MIT Press monographs. Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory, and The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty, and most recently the anthology Radical Equalities and Global Feminist Filmmaking (Vernon Press). She is currently writing a book about the filmmaker Jane Campion for Bloomsbury’s Philosophical Filmmakers Series