Virtual Graduate Seminar: The History of Moviegoing
September-November 2003

During the autumn (northern hemisphere)/ spring (southern hemisphere) term 2003 (September 8-December 8) the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA) will sponsor a semester-long graduate seminar on the history of the social experience of moviegoing. It will be led by Robert Allen of UNC and Kate Bowles of the University of Wollongong. In addition to reading and discussing key works in the field, participants will share their own research and collectively compile a bibliography of published research and archival and other sources for the study of the social experience of moviegoing. We will also solicit the participation of "guest" scholars in our internet sessions, who will discuss the theoretical, historiographic, and methodological dimensions of their own research.

We invite expressions of interest from graduate students at other institutions around the world who might wish to participate in this seminar. The "on-site" version of the course will include graduate students from a range of disciplines, and we seek online participants not only from the field of film studies, but those who bring to the study of the history of moviegoing backgrounds in cultural and social history, American studies, race and gender studies, comparative history, oral history, religious studies, and other fields as well. We will admit up to ten "virtual" participants, who will be enrolled in the course's Blackboard™ internet environment along with the students at UNC. Through Blackboard, these auditors will have access to all the course readings, discussion forums, posted research, and bibliographic resources. They will also be encouraged to post their own research for discussion by the entire group. The auditors will not receive UNC course credit for participating; however, they may wish to make participation in the virtual seminar a component of an independent study or directed readings course at their own university. We will be happy to provide supervising faculty with access to the Blackboard site so that they can review the auditor's contributions to the course.

Each week's reading and discussion will focus on a particular aspect of the study of the history of moviegoing. Among the topics covered will be:

• Theoretical accounts of cinematic spectatorship
• Moviegoing and modernity
• Moviegoing and the history of "everyday life"
• The historiography of cinematic reception
• Methodological challenges in studying the history of moviegoing
• Moviegoing and memory
• Movies and race
• Movies and ethnicity
• Movies, gender, and sexual orientation
• Comparative histories of moviegoing

Prospective participants should email a letter of interest and CV to Robert Allen and Kate Bowles no later than July 1, 2003.

Robert C. Allen is James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies, History, and Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the co-author (with Douglas Gomery) of Film History: Theory and Practice and the author of several articles on the history of moviegoing. With Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby, he serves on the organizing committee for the 2003 Commonwealth Fund Conference on the history of moviegoing.

Kate Bowles is Senior Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, and convenor of the Communication and Cultural Studies Program in the School of Social Science, Media and Communication. Together with Nancy Huggett, she is coordinating the Memories of Cinema database project, researching popular memories of cinema-going in the Illawarra region of New South Wales in the first half of the twentieth century.