Dr. Rachel Schaff is the Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Screen Studies in the Department of Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. She teaches Fiction Film Theory, Hollywood and American Film, Introduction to Film Aesthetics and Analysis, and FLEFF Festivals Immersion.
Her current research addresses questions of melodrama across various cinematic forms and national contexts in relationship to how Holocaust memorialization is institutionalized. Her additional research areas include film and media historiography, documentary, Holocaust and Genocide studies, and East Central European history and culture.
Her peer-reviewed scholarly essays have appeared in Afterimage, Cinema et Cie, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, Spectator: The USC Journal of Film and Television, and Studies in Eastern European Cinema. She has presented peer-reviewed conference papers at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Visible Evidence, and the Orphans Film Symposium at conferences in Canada, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Turkey, and the United States.
Dr. Schaff received her PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society and Moving Image Studies from the University of Minnesota. She also holds a MA in Film Studies from Columbia University and a BFA in Film and Television Production from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She was a Fulbright Institute of International Education Fellow to the Czech Republic in 2015-16. She was also the Margit Meissner Fellow for the Study of the Holocaust in the Czech Lands at the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2017.