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The graduate students of the Division of Critical Studies in USC’s School of Cinematic Arts announce the 4^th annual ZdC Graduate Student Conference.

SPECTRUMS

Saturday, February 27, 2010

9 AM-7 PM

School of Cinematic Arts, Mary Pickford Wing

University of Southern California

Free and Open to the Public

The 4^th annual ZdC Graduate Student Conference is committed to furthering Cinema and Media Studies as a field that benefits immeasurably from the intersections of disciplines and from openness to the wide spectrum of visual media. Our theme, Spectrums, lends itself to a variety of glosses: the allocation of broacast frequencies reflecting the political economy of the media; the range of wavelengths intelligible to the human eye; the spectre or the phantom, or that which cannot be observed because it fringes, stalks, or haunts the camera’s field of view. Confronted with these issues, Spectrums asks what remains outside our fields of disciplinary vision if we restrict our scholarship to a uniform or homogenous perspective.

In so doing, the Division of Critical Studies seeks to honor the life and work of the late Anne Friedberg, our department chair whose diverse research interests melded film and television scholarship with issues pertaining to visuality, proto-cinematic visual culture, and virtual environments. Inspired by Dr. Friedberg’s vision, we take the idea of Spectrums as an invitation to open research to a variety of discourses and to promote lively exchange between fields that too often remain isolated from one another. This conference seeks to explore the widest implications of the interdisciplinarity of Dr. Friedberg’s work and beyond to present a spectrum of the current research carried out by graduate students on issues related to film, television, and new media.