News and Events
Midwest Undergraduate Film Conference
University of Notre Dame - April 11-12, 2008
On April 11th & 12th, the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Film, Television, and Theatre will host the Second Annual Midwest Undergraduate Film Conference, which offers area undergraduate students the opportunity to present papers representing their best work in film and media studies.
The conference is free and open to the public, and it will take place in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center’s Michael Browning Family Cinema . Click here for information on how to get to the conference building.
For more information on any aspect of the conference, please contact Christine Becker,
cbecker1@nd.edu , 574-631-7592.
At the First Annual conference, participants included students from Notre Dame, Iowa, Tennessee, the Art Institute of Chicago, Denison, Ohio State, Southern Illinois, Purdue, Columbia College, Illinois, Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and Calvin College. Selected paper titles included: “The Wire: Institutions and Anti-Romanticism,” “Beneath Physical Reality: The Emergence of Death and Holocaust Trauma in Kracauer’s Theory of Film,” “Oldboy: South Korean Culture in the Context of the Masculine Western,” “Spoiled by the Media: TV, the Internet, and the Teenage Consumer,” “Madness in the Hills: Hollywood’s New Wave of Slasher Killers,” “Taking the ‘Nation’ Out of National Tragedy: Paul Greengrass’s Transnational Documentary Style,” and “Locating Violence: A Critical Analysis of the Western Image in A History of Violence and Last Days.”
Conference Schedule
Friday, April 11th 9:00-10AM (Eastern)
Conference Registration, DeBartolo Center for the Performing Arts
Refreshments, Browning Cinema Lobby
Friday, 10:00-11:15AM
National Cinema, National Identity
Moderator: Jill Godmilow, University of Notre Dame
Daniel Platt, Loyola University: “Finding Caligari: War, History, and Genre”
Emily Zuckert Church, University of Notre Dame: “Dissecting the Atom: Identity and Canadian National Cinema in Atom Egoyan’s Family Viewing”
Martha E. Polk, Carleton College: “New Iranian Cinema and Mohsen Makhmalbaf: Abandoning the Terms of the Discourse on Iranian National Identity”
Friday, 11:30-12:45PM
Dangerous Women
Moderator: Pamela Wojcik, University of Notre Dame
Matt Fagerholm, Columbia College: “Persona Non Grata”
Maria Iuppa, University of Notre Dame: “A Hint of Perversion: Domesticity in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt”
Abby Lee, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: “Villainous Power: Italian Horror Cinema’s Empowerment of Women”
Friday, 1:00-2:00PM
Lunch, DPAC Rehearsal Room (conference participants only)
Friday, 2:00-3:15PM
Adaptation and Reformulation
Moderator: Christopher Sieving, University of Notre Dame
Kelly Welch, Illinois State University, “Rosemary’s Adapted Baby: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation in Cinema”
Hayley M. Pogue, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: “A Picture Paints a Thousand Words: Examining Writers as Narrators in Atonement, Stranger Than Fiction, and The Lake House”
Breana Leader, University of Notre Dame, “Disney and the Counterculture”
Friday, 3:30-4:45PM
Representations of Christianity
Moderator: John Welle, University of Notre Dame
Joseph Brandon Colvin, Western Kentucky University: “Robert Bresson’s Illusory Grace”
Scott Elbin, University of Toledo: “David Fincher’s Se7en: Intersections of the Messiah and the Mass Murderer”
Justin Sherwood, University of Illinois at Chicago: “Into Great Silence: A Metaphorical Analysis”
Friday, 5:00-6:15PM
Heroes and Anti-Heroes
Moderator: Aaron Magnan-Park, University of Notre Dame
Brittany Lash, University of Notre Dame: “The Modern Popular Hero in Cinema”
A. Kay Terrell, Indiana University: “Spike as the Other: Gender, Sexuality, and Redemption in Modern Vampire Narratives”
Matthew Ownby, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even: An Examination of Female Revenge Films in 2007”
Friday, 6:30PM
Dinner at Legends (conference participants only)
Saturday, April 12th 8:30-9:00AM
Refreshments, Browning Cinema Lobby
Sat., 9:00-10:15AM
Unconventional Auteurs
Moderator: Susan Ohmer, University of Notre Dame
Julia Reeves, University of Chicago: “Reworking the Cinematic Feminine: The Experimental Filmmaking Techniques of Laura Mulvey and Chantal Akerman”
Mallory Richard, Wilfrid Laurier University: “The Apatow Effect: Transgression of Love, Sex and Masculinity in Contemporary Comedy”
Samuel B. Prime, Northwestern University: “Spike Lee’s Augmented Television-movie Preservation of A Huey P. Newton Story and its Interpretation of the Theatrical Principle of Liveness”
Sat., 10:30-11:45AM
Silent Film Exhibition
Moderator: Donald Crafton, University of Notre Dame
Sawyer J. Lahr, Columbia College: “Jane Addams and Motion Picture Reformation: A Fine Line Between ‘Theater of the People’ and ‘Breeding Places of Vice’”
Alison White Jarzyna, Carleton College: “Forgotten Film Stars: Bridging Hollywood and Small Town Audiences”
Andy Lauer, Carleton College: “Some Films Are Better Than Others: Lyman H. Howe, Cultural Capital, and Bringing the World to Northfield, MN”
Sat., 12:00-1:00PM
Lunch, DPAC Rehearsal Room (conference participants only)
Sat., 1:00-2:15PM
New Research in Television Studies
Moderator: Christine Becker, University of Notre Dame
Jenni Fong, University of Notre Dame: “Because We Believe: Cult TV Fandom and The X-Files”
Carla Barton, Northwestern University: “Better Sweaters: Compromise in The Cosby Show”
Cassie Belek, University of Notre Dame: “‘Pos-Mens’: Product Integration in 30 Rock”
Sat., 2:30-3:45PM
Tales of the Uncanny
Moderator: Jonathan Walley, Denison University
Jamie Hook, Indiana University: “Double Identities: Duplicity, Vision and the Double”
Randolph P. Ma, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign: “Crystallized Images: The Indiscernible Reality of the Brothers Quay”
Sara Freeman, Columbia College: “Max Ophuls’ Diary of the Dead: The Haunting Romanticism of Letter From an Unknown Woman”
Sat., 4:00-5:15PM
Transgressive and Hybrid Genres
Moderator: Jane Greene, Denison University
Justin Rice, Indiana University: “Eight Million Stories: The Naked City and In the Street”
Mike Lippert, Wilfrid Laurier University: “Laughing Into the Darkness: The Forms and Functions of Black Comedy”
Jessica Burgers, University of Notre Dame: “Children’s Horror in the 1970s and 1980s”