The Media Literacy subdivision in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures is dedicated to the study of evolving cultures \u2028of literacy\u2014from manuscripts and the material history of the book to \u2028performance, film, and emerging digital cultures\u2014that each call for \u2028singular modes of readerly or spectatorial engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The subdivision connects our faculty\u2019s research and teaching in literary and cultural studies to the \u2028fields of film and media to encompass such areas as film \u2028history and esthetics, media theory, and performance theory. The \u2028emergence of new forms of literacy attendant to the material objects and platforms \u2028through which culture is transmitted requires both a historical\u2028 perspective and appropriate analytic or critical paradigms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many \u2028faculty and students throughout the department ask in their research how different media bring about distinct\u2028 forms of reading, and how interpretive practices can be at one and the same time the stimulus\u2028 for cultural change and the expression of that change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
William Egginton\u2019s<\/a><\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Earle Havens<\/a><\/strong> 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<\/em> 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 \u201cArchaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Derek Schilling<\/a><\/strong> works in the fields of French literary and film studies. At Hopkins he has taught seminars on theories of cinema (\u201cFilm Theory and Critical Methods\u201d), screen temporalities (\u201cTime and Narrative in French Fiction Films\u201d), and transcultural film history (\u201cFranco-Algerian Screens\u201d). In Eric Rohmer<\/em> (Manchester UP, 2007) he explored how the acclaimed director translates Andr\u00e9 Bazin\u2019s ontological realist legacy into a highly controlled yet luminous vision of mise en sc\u00e8ne 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 (Ren\u00e9 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bernadette Wegenstein<\/a><\/strong> 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<\/a>, and is a professor of Media Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures. <\/p>\n\n\n\n