MA courses
MA Course Descriptions 2025-2026
Note: 600-level indicates MA, 800-level indicates PhD. Several courses are offered to both MA and PhD students.
FALL 2025
FMST 601 Methods in Film and Moving Image Studies I
Instructor: Marc Steinberg
Monday 1:15pm-5:15pm
This is a mandatory course in the Film Studies MA Program. It is designed to help students develop research, writing and presentation skills appropriate to the discipline of film studies. In addition to technical and practical matters, the course helps students develop productive and original research questions by examining notable issues in the field. Course materials examine the ways that film history, criticism, and textual analysis have been and can be written, encompassing a range of ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding cinema and the moving image.
FMST 622/822 Topics in Digital Media: Global Streaming Cultures
Instructor: Ishita Tiwary
Wednesday 1:15pm-5:15pm
Scholarship on SVOD platforms has primarily focused on US-based services (Netflix), English-language markets, and West European/North American users. When non-Western countries are considered, their differences are often viewed through the category of nation. This narrow focus leads to generalizations that overlook the diverse production and consumption practices present in the global majority. Rather than remaining in research silos of nation-based case studies, this MA seminar will focus on studying various contexts (US, Korea, India, Turkey, Nigeria, Brazil, Japan, Central and Eastern Europe) to identify other configurations across cultures and to redraw the global in media industry studies. The global here is defined not in a federated sense but as direct to consumer across a multi territory market. The course aims to develop new insights into global SVOD platform economy that is often obscured by conventional knowledge based on US focused experiences. It will so by providing a nuanced understanding of the functioning of SVOD platforms and content beyond the category of the national and by placing different contexts into conversations with each other.
FMST 635/835 Topics in Aesthetics & Cultural Theory: Sensory Media Ethnography
Instructor: Josh Neves
Thursday 1:15pm-5:15pm
This course combines audiovisual practice with critical approaches to digital media. Drawing on sensory ethnography, among other forms of documentary research and creation, we will (i) examine sensory ethnographic film, video, and other artworks; (ii) consider key debates in ethnography, documentary, and nonfiction research/practice; (iii) participate in weekly labs focused on video shooting, sound recording, editing, and related skills. The course will draw on approaches from a number of fields, including cinema and media studies, anthropology, urban studies, and critical social theory, as well as genealogies of documentary and experimental media. Students will create their own sound/video work and write a critical essay addressing key questions related to sensory/media ethnography. [*In addition to our weekly course meeting, students are required to participate in regular lab/training sessions on Friday afternoons in the GEM Lab.]
FMST 640/840 Topics in Film Genres: Repurposing Gender Media
Instructor: Rosanna Maule
Tuesday: 1:15pm-5:15pm
Repurposing denotes the reutilisation of existing media infrastructures or forms. Historically developed in late capitalism as the response to industry and corporate culture, repurposing has also been absorbed into the mainstream.
This seminar explores the multiple dimensions of repurposing as a feminist, queer, intersectional, and ecological approach to film and media. Its purpose is to trace the historical and conceptual manifestations of repurposing as an alternative media strategy by artists, activists, and fans, developed either individually or within independent and grassroots circuits and organizations of cinematic production, distribution, or circulation.
Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework including intersectional and decolonial media feminist theory, queer theory, affect theory, and political theory, the seminar will focus on feminist and LGBTQ-informed vidding and remix practices, memes, video, MTV, and music video reappropriations of popular culture, and archive-based films and videos.
Weekly screenings.
WINTER 2026
FMST 632/832 Topics in National Cinemas: American Cinema of the 1950's
Instructor: Catherine Russell
Thursday 8:45-12:45
Hollywood in the 1950s was an industry in transition, even while it produced some of the strongest films of its history. With the rise of independent productions, the competition of TV, and major shifts in the social fabric, American cinema was dramatically changed during this decade. In this course we will examine the social and cultural climate of the HUAC trials and the Cold War, the civil rights movement, transformations of the urban environment, popular Freudianism, and censorship. Screenings will include examples of social problem films, revisionist Westerns, and film ‘gris’; readings will include analyses of race and gender within this transitional era and a variety of historiographic approaches to the period. Students will be required to do research projects and presentations.
FMST 635/835 Topics in Aesthetic Cultural Theory: Global Popular Film and Media
Instructor: Masha Salazkina
Monday 1:15pm-5:15pm
This course will give an overview of some of the key topics and methodologies that form part of transnational approaches to studying film and media. We will begin with the discussion of some of the key terms used in contemporary scholarship, moving on to the analysis of various forms of border-crossing in both, representation and media practices. Emphasis will be placed on global popular media and cultural forms, and on informal modes of its production and circulation.
FMST 660/860 Topics in Film Directors: Comparative Style Analysis - Hitchcock and Welles
Instructor: John Locke
Tuesday 1:15pm-5:15pm
This seminar examines the work of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. Each week a film by Welles or Hitchcock is screened and then discussed using detailed analysis of video segments. The seminar is about the use of formal analysis to understand film style.
An additional aim of the close analysis of these films is to question familiar critical views about them. These films have been discussed so frequently in the literature that an effort needs to be made to break with the conventional views and look again at the films themselves.
The principal written work required is an essay about a particular Welles or Hitchcock film selected by the student at the beginning of the term. The student concentrates on this one film during the entire term.
FMST 665/865 Topics in Film an Moving Image Studies: Speculative Pragmatism
Instructor: Erin Manning
Tuesday 8:45-12:45
The question of interpretation looms large in encounters with cinematic practice. As students of critique, we often assume we already know how interpretation stages this encounter. But what is interpretation? What does it assume? How does it value, and evaluate?
Process philosophy, and in particular the work of Alfred North Whitehead, calls itself a “critique of pure feeling.” This is a stark rejoinder to Immanuel Kant’s “critique of pure reason,” which is an account of how reason stages and organizes the question of value, obfuscating the very question of how reason itself has become a stand-in for value. Any close reader of Kant’s work on value will, for instance, understand the implicit model of whiteness and heteropatriarchy - the question of who possesses reason is at the heart of this philosophy of aesthetic judgement.
A critique of pure feeling departs from this schema to ask what affective tonalities are carried by existence. Instead of starting from the human subject, it begins from process itself. Feeling, here, is not a subjective act - it is now how “I” feel. Feeling is the pulse, the lure, the tone in the encounter that makes a world. Interpretation is not how we stand apart from that world. Interpretation is the activity of an ecology of practices: it is what allows certain tendencies to stand out, to become expressive. Interpretation is immanent to the event of experience.
This mode of philosophy is called “speculative pragmatism.” It is pragmatic to the degree that it asks how. How is the world made, in this instance? How does it come into this singular instance of itself? This pragmatic question is exemplary. It cannot be generalized. As a film scholar, it relies on asking active questions: what is happening, here, now? What are the conditions that are making this possible? It requires an open, close, detailed encounter with what the work itself is doing. It practices immanent critique: a lived encounter with the qualities of the experience itself. And it is speculative to the degree that it is open to the “what else” that also moves through it. This “what else” is what philosophers Henri Bergson or Gilles Deleuze would call “the virtual” - that force that carries experience and opens it to its more-than.
In this course, we will engage closely with the question of how interpretation stages an encounter with value. This is never a neutral question. Interpretation carries inheritances - the world’s more-than is also what it brings with it to obfuscate other forms of existence. That is to say: interpretation as usually staged in the context of critique brings with it presuppositions around value. In so doing, it obfuscates general assumptions around whiteness, and neurotypicality, presuming an able-bodied subject (a man of reason) as its messenger. Our aim will be to learn together how to practice immanent critique from the angle of speculative pragmatism, and, in so doing, how to become more sensitive to the presuppositions of the discourse of value emboldened by prevalent notions of critique and interpretation.
We will work together to fashion the cinematic bibliography, focusing on works students are engaging in their MA/PhD research. Each student will be invited to bring a work that we will engage collectively.
Readings will include:
Alfred North Whitehead Adventures of Ideas
William James Essays in Radical Empiricism
Saidiya Hartman Wayward Lives
Brian Massumi Semblance and Event
Erin Manning For a Pragmatics of the Useless