Visual Culture Program Event

Since cinema's emergence in the late nineteenth century, moving image technologies have offered increasingly powerful and immersive virtual worlds through which humans may encounter and reimagine the natural and built environments. More than merely imagined or illusionary, these new media worlds depend on vast networks of resource extraction with far-reaching material and social consequences. Media environments are always material environments first.

The Anthropocene Media Working Group's general approach builds on four guiding postulates: 1) Audiovisual media are systems of material and virtual world creation with roots in the technologies and logics of the Industrial Revolution and its dependence upon world-altering regimes of colonial extraction. 2) Media systems don't simply represent but in fact themselves embody the anthropocentric ambitions of Western modernity and its resource-hungry forms of life. 3) Those same systems equally hold the potential for modes of perception and recording that decenter human vision and may be used to build and model alternate and even resistant social formations. 4) Whether anthropocentric or radically estranging, moving-image media are directly implicated in the warming of the world and its strained and estranged ecologies.

This year's meeting has two parts: Part I—The Great Derangement of the Senses—will build on last year's symposium with a focus on how cinematic media have offered ways to experiment with the construction, regulation, preservation, and destruction of climates while also articulating new conceptual, aesthetic, and formal idioms for a productive derangement of sensory perception. Part II—Anthropocene Media Infrastructure—will explore the entangled histories of virtual and material worldmaking that define an "Anthropocene media," with an emphasis on the material components of that media's undergirding technological and conceptual infrastructures.

REGISTER HERE

SCHEDULE

Thursday, June 5 – Chen 100
Part I: The Great Derangement of the Senses

10:00am

10:30am – 12:00pm

12:00pm – 1:30pm

1:30pm – 3:00pm

3:30pm – 5:00pm

5:15 – 6:00

Friday, June 6 – Baxter B125
Part II: Anthropocene Media Infrastructure

10:00am

10:30am – 12:00pm

12:00pm – 1:30pm

1:30pm – 3:00pm

3:30pm – 5:00pm

5:00-5:30

SPEAKERS

James Leo Cahill is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies and French Literature at the University of Toronto. He is author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé, which was shortlisted as best first book by the Modernist Studies Association, coeditor with Luca Caminati of Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, coeditor with Brian Jacobson and Weihong Bao of a special issue of Representations on Media Climates, and author of over two dozen book chapters and journal articles. He is also general editor of the journal Discourse.

Carolina Sá Carvalho works across visual culture, literature, and environmental humanities. She is the author of Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2023), which was short-listed for the Modern Language Association First Book Prize. The book also received the Roberto Reis First Book Award from the Brazilian Studies Association and Best Book Awards from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in its Environment, Amazonia, and Visual Culture Studies sections. Sá Carvalho is currently working on her second book, Mosquito Aesthetics and the Politics of Contagion in Brazil. She serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Toronto.

Sasha Crawford-Holland is a media scholar and Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Arts and Communication Studies at Vanderbilt University. Sasha's research and teaching investigate the relations between media, violence, and social justice, with an emphasis on environmental issues. This research is published in J.C.M.S.: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Jump Cut, Film History, Television & New Media, the London Review of International Law, and the collection Indigenous Media Arts in Canada. Currently, Sasha is working on a book about how media make sense of oppressive heat.

Jennifer Fay is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Cinema & Media Arts, Professor of English and German Studies, and Chair of the Department of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Theaters of Occupation: Hollywood and the Reeducation of Postwar Germany (2008), Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (2018) and co-author of Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization. She has recently published articles in Screen, Representations, Critical Inquiry, and New German Critique.

Brian Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology and Director of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. He is the author of The Cinema of Extractions: Film Materials and Their Forms (Columbia University Press, 2025) and Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia UP, 2015). His edited volume, In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020) won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies award for Best Edited Collection and the Limina Prize for Best International Cinema Studies Book. With James Leo Cahill and Weihong Bao he edited "Media Climates," the Winter 2022 issue of Representations, and he is currently editing, with Maggie Bell, "Art + Electric Light," a special section of Leonardo.

Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose research explores the history of photography, film, and modern art through an ecological lens. She holds a joint-PhD in Art History and Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Chicago and is currently Assistant Professor of German Media at the University of Minnesota. Her research has appeared in the Journal of Visual Culture, Representations, Photographica, and Transbordeur.

Debashree Mukherjee is Associate Professor of film and media in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University. She is author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City(2020), which approaches film history as an ecology of material practices and practitioners. Her current book project, Tropical Machines: A Surprising History of Modern Media, develops a media history of South Asian indentured migration and plantation modernity from the 1830s onwards. Debashree edits the peer-reviewed journals BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies and Screen, and has published in journals such as Film History, Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, Representations, MUBI Notebook, and Modern Asian Studies. Her latest publication is the co-edited anthology The Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas (2024) which won the first Aruna Vasudev book award from the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC).

Thomas Patrick Pringle is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (Meson and University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Pringle's research on environmental media appears in NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Journal of Film and Video, Media-N, New Media and Society, as well as the volumes Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Legacies and Futures (2022) and Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy (2025). He serves on the editorial boards of Film History: An International Journal and Journal of Environmental Media.

Jennifer Lynn Peterson is Professor of Media Studies at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. She is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). Her scholarship has been published in journals such as Representations, JCMS, Feminist Media Histories, Camera Obscura, Moving Image, and in numerous edited volumes. She has published film, art, and book reviews in Texte zur Kunst, Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artforum.com. She is completing work on her second book, under contract with Columbia University Press, which examines the ecological significance of Hollywood and nontheatrical films shot on location in the 1920s-40s.

Mehak Sawhney (she/her) is a PhD candidate and Vanier Canada Graduate Scholar in Communication Studies at McGill University with research interests in sound and media studies, surveillance studies, and environmental humanities. Her dissertation and book project, Audible Waters: Sounding and Surveilling the Indian Ocean, explores the territorial politics of underwater acoustic sensing in postcolonial India and the Indian Ocean. Her published and forthcoming work appears in Media, Culture & Society, Kalfou, Disclaimer, Cultural Studies, and Discourse, among other platforms.

Anna Stielau is the Weisman Postdoctoral Instructor in Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology. Her research and teaching interests span contemporary art, visual culture, and media activism, with a focus on how art and technology collude to drive social change in Southern Africa. She earned her Ph.D. from New York University's Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, supported by fellowships from the Oppenheimer Foundation and the Urban Democracy Lab, among others. Before relocating to the United States, she taught art history and photography at the University of Cape Town.

Tinghao Zhou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), and the recipient of the 2024 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship. His research focuses on the intersections of media theory, environmental humanities and justice, science and technology studies, critical infrastructure studies, and digital culture in China and beyond. He is currently working on his dissertation that explores the trans-scalar, metabolic impact of the global media economy on the local ecologies and politics of China through the living archives of migrant labor bodies and sensoria, mineral-absorbing plants, and the rural landscapes. Tinghao's work has been supported by the Chancellor's Fellowship from UCSB, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Mellon Foundation, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), among others. He currently serves as the coordinating and book review editor for Journal of Media+Environment.