Conversations Across Screen Cultures, an online initiative featuring live interviews and discussions with film and media scholars, media artists, and programmers continues its 2023-2024 academic year series on February 27 at 7pm with Caroline Charles, PhD Candidate in English at Syracuse University and 2023-2024 Diversity Scholars Fellow at Ithaca College. Charles will be interviewed by Chelsea Wessels, Co-Director of Film Studies at East Tennessee State University.
Register in advance for this meeting: https://hws.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJArdeihqTIoHNELJAHq8Te2CL74m0HunP…
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
Caroline Charles received her BA from Williams College in 2018. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the English department at Syracuse University and a 2023-2024 Diversity Scholars Fellow at Ithaca College. Her dissertation, Practices of the Black Visual Archive in Film, closely analyzes the creative methods Black filmmakers have employed to intervene in Black material histories shaped by visual devaluation, hypervisibility, fragmentation, and absence. The project argues that cinema is a site for continued Black archival practice wherein Black filmmakers have creatively harnessed the medium to negotiate the constraints of traditional archival repositories, working to ensure the survival and preservation of Black life against an on-going climate of anti-Black racism.
In 2019-2020, Caroline was awarded Syracuse University’s African-American Studies Fellowship, and in 2022 she worked as a Graduate Curatorial and Instruction Assistant in Bird Library’s Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). In that position, Caroline co-curated the archival exhibition, A Love Supreme: Black Cultural Expression and Political Activism of the 1960s and 1970s which has been displayed in the SCRC (spring 2023) and at The Community Folk Art Center (fall 2023). As a 2023 recipient of Humanities New York’s Public Humanities Grant, Caroline is currently working co-collaboratively on a project titled Family Pictures Syracuse. This initiative by the city’s Turning the Lens Collective seeks to build a more inclusive archive of the city of Syracuse using the community’s everyday family photographs.
Dr. Chelsea Wessels joined ETSU in 2018 as an Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Film Studies minor. She received her PhD from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where her work focused on the emergence of the western as a political and popular genre in global cinema. Her research interests include local cinema history and archives, global film genres, and feminist film. Her publications include writing for the National Film Registry, journal articles in Transformations and Frames Cinema Journal, and chapters in Teaching Transnational Cinemas and The Western in the Global South. She previously taught at Ithaca College, Cornell University, and Colby College. An advocate for community engagement with independent film, she has served on multiple festival juries and currently works with the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival and the Johnson City Film Festival.
Conversations Across Screen Cultures is a collaboratively produced speaker series that creates space for dynamic conversations among screen studies scholars and practitioners. Sessions feature open discussion and dialogue between speakers and attendees. Begun by Patty Zimmermann during the pandemic lockdown, Conversations Across Screen Cultures honors Patty’s legacy by promoting connection and collaboration as critical modes for screen studies practice.
Direct any inquiries you may have about this event to: shafer@hws.edu