The Department of Theatre, Film and Dance is becoming a focal point for a growing network of film and media studies scholars across campus, with two recent interdisciplinary conferences and nine faculty members added to the graduate field.

These developments and a growing number of graduate students writing dissertations on film are jump-starting the minor in film and video graduate studies. Some faculty recently recruited to the graduate field "are developing new books on cinema that range from Indian film to Russian film to Egyptian film, so there's interesting connections to area studies programs," said Sabine Haenni, associate professor of theatre, film and dance and American studies.

Department chair Amy Villarejo said: "Cornell has people trained in literature or political theory or history or what have you who have a strong interest in film, who write on film and who work out of area studies models or from a broadly understood concept of culture or cultural studies. The next challenge, she said, is to "distinguish what Cornell has to offer at both the undergraduate and graduate levels and create a robust research environment for graduate students who may want to enter the field, as we're increasingly seeing."

The two conferences offered some direction toward that goal. Violence, Gender and the Cinematic Nation, held March 27-28, included papers on world cinema and nationalism, bringing together "humanists and social scientists and more area studies people than I've seen in a very long time," Villarejo said.

"We found a remarkable measure of support [and] even people who couldn't come wrote papers and wanted to be involved," said Matthew Evangelista, government, who co-organized the workshop with Anindita Banerjee, comparative literature, who is developing a book inspired by her research on South Asian cinema.

The second conference, Mean Streets: Violence and the Cinematic City, held April 10-11 and organized by Haenni and Mary Woods in architecture, featured such guest filmmakers as Vani Subramanian (who was also a University Lecturer), and panels moderated by graduate students.

While Cornell offers many film-related events, "they haven't been on this scale of two major conferences in a single semester, and they haven't been as integrative of Cornell's various constituencies as Mean Streets was," Villarejo said. "The collaboration between architecture and film, involving both makers and scholars, opened up a kind of discussion that I haven't seen happen here before."

Having faculty such as John Zissovici in architecture, who made a film for the Mean Streets symposium, and Daniel Gold -- who directs the South Asia Program and teaches a course on Asian cinema -- makes Cornell a unique place for film and media studies, Villarejo said.

"We're building on a very strong foundation laid by Tim Murray and others over the past two decades," she said.

In addition to fostering a cinema and media studies research community for faculty and graduate students, "a symposium like Mean Streets offers a whole range of possibilities of what it could mean to study film," and helps nourish undergraduate research, she said.

Many undergraduates in film studies go on to film schools or to Ph.D. programs, "and it's actually easy to place them in the top programs," Haenni said.

Graduate students at Cornell are also distinguishing themselves.

"There's this momentum that's really lovely of these students writing dissertations squarely in the field and being recognized as at the top of the game, and then moving on to extraordinary, very competitive jobs in the field," Villarejo said.

For example, Caetlin Benson-Allott, Ph.D. '08 in English, wrote about the history of video to win the 2009 Dissertation Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and was recently hired to "a plum film studies job at University of California-Santa Cruz," Villarejo said.

Comparative literature Ph.D. candidates Paul Flaig and Katherine Groo also focus on film in their dissertations. Flaig is writing on German film comedy and animation, and Groo's dissertation is on ethnographic cinema in France in the early 20th century. She defends in June and has a job waiting at Scotland's University of Aberdeen.

Cornell graduate students who end up teaching cinema and media studies have "the ability to move back and forth from a strong core training in the discipline" and other fields including theory, Haenni said.