Copy
photo credit, Mary Lou Chlipala
  Our SAC community is growing!
An enthusiastic group of new majors show off their t-shirts after declaring at this year's SACapalooza last Friday in Studio A. The event included presentations by SAC faculty and the student organization React to Film. 
THIS WEEK'S EVENTS
LSA Major/Minor Expo
Wednesday, March 23
Michigan Union Rogel Ballroom
11:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. 

If you are a current undergraduate who is still undecided and/or undeclared, check out the Major/Minor Expo -- an expo wherein you will find all the departments in one place for easy comparison shopping; friendly conversations with knowledgeable people; advisors who help students find the right questions to ask; a chance to find your passion -- and, of course, excellent swag!
SAC Speaker Series Presents 
Teaching Race and Media: A Roundtable Discussion
Thursday, March 24
Space 2435, North Quad
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. 
This interdisciplinary roundtable discussion focuses on strategies and issues related to teaching race and media. The purpose of this event is to create a conversation about teaching in this area, while sharing expertise and experience that will be useful to faculty and graduate students alike. Participants Robin R. Means Coleman (Professor, Afroamerican and African Studies and Communications), Yeidy Rivero (Professor, Screen Arts & Cultures), and Colin Gunckel (Assistant Professor, American Culture and Screen Arts & Cultures) will have a wide-ranging discussion about a number of topics including syllabus design, classroom dynamics, assignment strategies, and the teaching of potentially controversial subjects. This event was made possible by the Diversity in Media Project, organized by Colin Gunckel and Candace Moore, the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching Faculty Development Fund, and the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures.   
Greater Questions in Neuroscience Presents
Neurocinematics: The Mind on Movies and Movies on the Mind 
featuring Drs. Shelly Flagel, Taraz Lee, Julia Lippman, and Markus Nornes 
Friday, March 25
Undergraduate Science Building, 1230
4:00 - 6:00  p.m. 
During this colloquium, a panel of experts from different fields will be leading an open discussion on Neurocinematics in which they will consider the following questions: 
  • What happens in the brain when we watch movies?
  • Why do people respond so viscerally to something they know to be a performance?
  • What causes people to form such strong connections and lasting memories with movies?
  • How are movies made to take advantage of the brain’s responses?
  • How are the advances in neuroscience used to market movies?
MARK YOUR CALENDARS
Silent Babel: Cinematic Multilingualism Beyond the Soundtrack
Monday, April 4
2435 North Quad 
4:00 - 5:30 p.m. 
In this talk, Lisa Patti (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) and Tijana Mamula (John Cabot University) advocate the opening of film studies to a broader appreciation of the ways in which linguistic difference has shaped, and continues to shape, the medium's history. While most studies of the subject have explored linguistic difference as a largely audible phenomenon – manifested through polyglot dialogues, or through the translation of monolingual dialogues for international audiences – this talk explores some of its unheard histories, thus contributing to a new field of enquiry based on an attentiveness to multilingualism's work beyond the soundtrack. 



Patti and Mamula are the editors of the forthcoming anthology The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference (Bloomsbury, Spring 2016).
With generous co-sponsorship from the Department of Comparative Literature, the Sheldon Cohn Fund in the Department of Screen Arts & Cultures, the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, the Department of Linguistics, the Department of History, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, the Department of American Culture, the Institute for the Humanities, the Rackham Graduate School, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.
The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging Gay Equality
A Talk by Suzanna Duanta Walters, Professor of Sociology and Director, WGSS Program Northeastern University
Wednesday, April 6
2239 Lane Hall
4:10 p.m. 
 
What’s wrong with tolerance? And how could it possibly undermine real gay equality?
In this talk, Walters considers how the pseudo-science of “born this way” can combine with demands for marriage equality and a place in the military to create a “trap.” The trap is to imagine that being tolerated is the same as robust integration for America’s gay citizens. We tolerate what we find unpleasant: pain, medicine, annoying relatives. Walters looks at how science, law and popular culture work to create a world where we have marriage equality and gay celebrities, but we also have historically high rates of violence against LGBTQ citizens, a variety of anti-gay legal initiatives and a supposedly gay-friendly Hollywood where very few stars actually come out. Tolerance is not the end goal, but a dead end for anyone seeking genuine equality.
 
Sponsored by IRWIG; cosponsored by the Departments of Communication Studies and Screen Arts & Cultures.
SAC Speaker Series Presents
A Talk by Boston University's Deborah Jaramillo 
"In Pursuit of Wholesome TV: The Strange Path to the Television Code" 
Thursday, April 7
SAC Conference Room, North Quad 
11:30 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. 
Deborah L. Jaramillo is an assistant professor of Film and Television Studies at Boston University. Her current book project traces the history of the 1952 Television Code.
The Television Code is a document full of the anxieties and consensus politics of the 1950s, the appeasements of a terrified commercial industry, and the standardization of quotidian business deals.  The original TV Code, crafted by the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters and implemented in March 1952, underwent twenty-one revisions until the entire enterprise collapsed in 1983.  Perhaps because the Code regulated both program content and stations’ dealings with advertisers it is not understood to be as controversial or dramatic as the Hollywood Production Code.  And perhaps because multiple Radio Codes preceded the 1952 Code, scholars consider it to be more of the same—an inevitable step toward industrial maturity.  The journey to the TV Code is simultaneously surprising, funny, maddening, and devastating.  By tracing that journey this presentation will explore the relationships and power struggles that bound national and local interests—both private and public—to the policing of television content.  
THIS WEEK'S FEATURED PHOTO
photo credit, Mary Lou Chlipala
 
Actor Delroy Lindo (left) poses with SAC's Jim Burnstein, Oliver Thornton, and Veerendra Prasad after his workshop "The Script Through the Actor's Lens," a special event sponsored by the Screenwriting Program in conjunction with the Department of Theatre & Drama. 
NEWS
Senior Lecturer and Associate Chair Terri Sarris Wins Award at AAFF
Terri Sarris received the PROCAM Best Regional Filmmaker Award from the 54th Ann Arbor Film Festival for her film, Our Last Hurrah, a cinematic portrait of family, nostalgia, and impending loss. The Film Festival jurors this year included Garbiñe Ortega, Carl Bogner, and Rebecca Baron. To view a list of all of this year's festival award winners, click here. 
SAC Affiliate Professor Amanda Lotz Publishes Guest Blog in Broadcasting & Cable
Professor Amanda Lotz published a "guest blog" in industry publication Broadcasting & Cable exploring "How OTT Hides Television's Revolution."  In the article, Lotz argues, "Not talking about the evolution of television as a change in delivery mechanism has obscured real understanding of industry change, and thinking about all broadband-delivered content—regardless of business model—as simply 'OTT' misses meaningful differences." Lotz's article was the most viewed content on the site the day it published and was included in the Benton Foundation (media policy) daily headlines and NATPE weekly newsletter. Read the full text here. 
Former Michigan Fellow Damon Young Wins ACLA Award for New Manuscript 
Damon Young, who worked as an Assistant Professor and Michigan Fellow in SAC until starting a job at the Department of Film & Media at UC Berkeley this year, has received the Helen Tartar First Book Subvention Award from the American Comparative Literature Association for his manuscript, "Making Sex Public: Cinema, Sex, and the Social." Young recently expressed his gratitude to SAC for their work in hosting and organizing a manuscript workshop, a forum that helped him to finalize the manuscript for publication. 
Doctoral Candidate Benjamin Strassfeld Selected for Sweetland Dissertation Writing Institute This Spring
The Dissertation Writing Institute is for graduate students whose research is complete or nearly complete, who have conceptualized the principal elements of the dissertation, and who have already begun to write the dissertation. Participants attend the Institute for at least six hours each day during the eight weeks of the Spring term. They participate in group discussions, where they share their writing and receive feedback. Paul Barron, faculty member at the Center and in English Language and Literature, says faculty seek to build students' confidence in their writing, and encourage them to view themselves not just as scholars but also as writers. "We have no specialized knowledge of their field. This allows us to focus on the writing itself," he says.  During the Institute, Strassfeld will be working on his dissertation "The Detroit Model: Regulating Race and Pornography, 1950-1979" in which he examines the history of media censorship and antiporn politics in Detroit within the context of the broader history of racial and class politics in the city. 
Congratulations - and best of luck, Ben!
 
The Dissertation Writing Institute is supported by the College of Literature, Science & the Arts, the Rackham Graduate School, and the Sweetland Center for Writing.
SAC Graduate Student Spotlight: SAC Certificate Student Mélissa Gélinas
Mélissa Gélinas is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature, with a Graduate Certificate in SAC. Her dissertation focuses on multilingualism and language ideologies in twenty-first-century cinema and literature. She is particularly interested in multilingual texts that deploy language in a way that departs from what is perceived as neutral, natural, or most expected, by shunning translation or using non-standard, hybrid languages, for instance. Her dissertation specifically examines cross-cultural circulation and how it shapes the form and politics of such multilingual texts, and vice versa.
Mélissa is currently finishing a paper for the upcoming SCMS conference, which focuses on trailers and the transnational circulation of multilingual films. Concretely, she analyses various trailers of multilingual Latin American films that make prominent use of an (untranslated) indigenous language, in conjunction with different (national and linguistic) contexts of production, distribution, and reception. The paper provides insight into films’ accumulation of meaning in circulation, while addressing the specificities of this process for multilingual cinema and transnational Latin American cinema.
SAC 400 Winter 2015 Film to Screen at the Carnegie Mellon Student Short Film Competition This Friday
The Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival is celebrating its 10th anniversary with the theme “Faces of Conflict”. As a collaborative project between Carnegie Mellon and Point Park University, this year’s Student Short Film Competition invited students from all over the world to submit original short films that show their talent in filmmaking and passionately capture the ubiquitous and intimate theme of conflict through their own personal lens. The SAC 400 Winter 2015 film Method,(Sam Barnett, Amanda Bohnson, Raj Brueggemann, Josh Gibert, Andre Grosse, Alex Heatlie, Kinza Ilyas, Brennan Quinn, Elizabeth Sabia, Alec Schweitzer, and Zach Shive) was selected to be screened as a part of the Student Short Film Competition this Friday, March 25, from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m., at the George Rowland White Theater, Point Park's University Center. Method is about a failing actor’s journey to find his true self when he loves each of his “characters” more than himself or any real person (starring Luke Jackson and Tristan Rewald).
Media Scholars Meet in Atlanta for Annual SCMS Conference 
Look for the SCMS Special Edition of the SAC Newsletter (coming this week!) for a complete schedule of SAC presentations and faculty/student involvement in this conference.
Visit Our Website 

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list