Roger Ebert Lecture: Re-Enchanting Our Relationship to Film and Media History: A Brief Survey of the Media Ecology Project
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory, Urbana
Join us for the official launch of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies, including opening remarks by Chaz Ebert, a video message from filmmaker and Roger Ebert's friend Martin Scorsese, the inaugural Roger Ebert Lecture, and a film screening.
2022 Roger Ebert Lecture
Re-Enchanting Our Relationship to Film and Media History: A Brief Survey of the Media Ecology Project
From 4-5 p.m., the inaugural Roger Ebert Lecture will be presented by University of Illinois alum Mark Williams (BA '78, LAS), associate professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth College and director of the Media Ecology Project, followed by a Q&A.
Register to join via Zoom.
At 6:15 p.m., join us for a film screening featuring selections from the Civil Rights Newsfilm collection (1950-1980) and other films in the Media Ecology Project.
About the presenter:
Mark Williams is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College and director of the NEH-supported digital humanities research initiative The Media Ecology Project (MEP), which is developing new digital tools to create a virtuous cycle of interdisciplinary scholarship about archival media that adds value back to participating archives.
He has published widely on film and media history, for example in Feminist Media Histories; Crafts, Trades, and Techniques of Early Cinema [DOMITOR series]; The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and The Digital Humanities; A Companion to the History of American Broadcasting; The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and The Digital Humanities; Télévision: le moment expérimental (1935-1955); Convergence Media History; New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality; Collecting Visible Evidence [Visible Evidence series]; No Laughing Matter: Visual Humor in Ideas of Race, Nationality and Ethnicity; Dietrich Icon; Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays; and Living Color: Race, Feminism, and Television. He is a co-editor and contributor to Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, Archive (AFI Series, Routledge, 2018).
At Dartmouth he directed the foundational digital humanities Cyber-Disciplinarity Humanities Institute, founded an e-journal, The Journal of e-Media Studies, co-edited the book series Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture, and received a Scholarly Innovation and Advancement award and two Neukom grants to build MEP. With John Bell he developed the NEH-funded Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT). They subsequently received two NEH advancement grants to develop SAT for studies of early cinema and civil rights era newsfilm. (See their 2021 essay in Digital Humanities Quarterly for additional details.) A new MEP project is studying the international motion picture legacies of the US Information Agency. With Prof. Ayo Coly he recently received a Dean of the Faculty Award to develop a new interdisciplinary course on “The Idea of Africa.”