Professor Terri Ginsberg, PhD

Assistant Professor, Cinema

Biography    Teaching activities    Publications    Art exhibitions    Recent film production    Grants    Academic memberships   

Profile

Before coming to Concordia University, Terri Ginsberg was assistant professor of film at The American University in Cairo, where she also served as Director of the Film Program. She earned her doctorate in cinema studies at New York University and has also taught film, media, literary, and cultural studies at Rutgers University, NYU, Dartmouth College, Ithaca College, SUNY-Purchase and the City University of New York. Her areas of scholarly expertise include Palestinian and Palestine solidarity cinema, German Cinema, Holocaust film, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, and methods of academic pedagogy and institutional critique. Her book-length publications include a recent short monograph, Films of Arab Loutfi and Heiny Srour: Studies in Palestine Solidarity Cinema (November 2021); a multi-authored, co-edited encyclopedia, Historical Dictionary of Middle Eastern Cinema (2010; 2nd ed. 2020); two earlier monographs, Visualizing the Palestinian Struggle: Towards a Critical Analytic of Palestine Solidarity Film (2016) and Holocaust Film: The Political Aesthetics of Ideology (2007); and three co-edited collections, Cinema of the Arab World: Contemporary Directions in Theory and Practice (2020), A Companion to German Cinema (2012), and Perspectives on German Cinema (1996). She has also published numerous articles and reviews in peer-reviewed anthologies and academic journals, some of which she has co-edited in the form of special issues, including Arab Studies Quarterly (co-ed. 2011), Situations (co-ed. 2011), Journal of Cinema and Media Studies,  Review of Middle East Studies, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Spectator, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Textual Practice, Genders, GLQ, Journal of the History of Sexuality, and the edited volume Teaching Transnational Cinema. She has also edited two special issues on film and media of the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies (2009; 2016). Additionally, she wrote the scholarly essay that accompanies Olive Films' remastered Blu-ray version of Playing for Time (starring Vanessa Redgrave) and is co-editor of the scholarly academic book series, Cinema and Media Cultures in the Middle East (Peter Lang). Ginsberg has served as co-chair of several caucuses of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, including the Middle East Caucus, the Caucus on Class, the Queer Caucus, and the Caucus Coordinating Committee, and is an appointed member of the SCMS Task Force on Global Inclusivity. She also serves on the advisory board of the International Association of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, and is a founding member of MEMIC: The Middle East Moving Image Collective. In addition to scholarly writing, she has blogged for Arabisto, ZNet, Mondoweiss and The Electronic Intifada, and written film reviews for Cinéaste. Her most recent project is a co-edited collection on the governmentalization of international film education during the Cold War.

Courses taught / scheduled at Concordia

Books

Robert Colescott: The Cairo Years

In February-March 2021, Dr. Ginsberg co-curated (with art historian Matthew Weseley and visual artist Duncan MacDonald) a major, first-of-its-kind international exhibition of selected paintings by African American artist, Robert Colescott, made during a 3-year period spanning a crucial time in which Colescott lived in Cairo and taught for one of those years at The American University in Cairo, where he was the first African American faculty member and where he would initiate the formal study, encouragement, and exhibition of Egyptian modern art in Cairo.  The exhibition also included relevant archival documents from the period, videos of lectures Colescott would later give in the U.S. describing the importance of his Cairo experience, as well as a supplementary exhibition featuring biographical data on the eleven Egyptian artists whose paintings Colescott featured in AUC's first art exhibition, "Eleven Artists," held in February 1967 at the Tahrir Square campus' Corridor Gallery (a space initiated and launched by Colescott). The exhibition was nominated in a “Best of 2021” article that appeared in the December 2021 issue of Artforum International.  Dr. Ginsberg gave an interview about the exhibition with Concordia University News in January 2022.

Producer, Stopping Overian Cancer, the Silent Killer (dir. Francesca Andrade, Egypt, 2020)