Documenting the Archive: Department of Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference

Documentary film practice inflects and is in turn also inflected by the theories and practices around the study of the archive. Documenting the Archive will be a forum for theoretical and methodological interventions in cinema and media studies by invoking the archive’s historical and theoretical relationship with cinema, especially documentary film practice. This conference pushes the boundaries of cinema and media studies to ask what domains of critical inquiry, forms of experience, and historiographic methodologies emerge by examining the multifarious relations between documentary and archives. Keynote address by Paula Amad (University of Iowa). See the full conference program at documentingthearchive.wordpress.com. 

The conference is organized by Cinta Pelejà, Ritika Kaushik, and Sean Batton. 

Paula Amad is Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. The author of Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (2011), she has also published articles in Camera Obscura, Framework, Film History, and Cahiers de la Cinémathèque. She has previously taught at Melbourne University, Indiana University, and University of Paris III. She received the Getty Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Shpilman Institute of Photography Research Award, and a Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.