One of Jennifer Fay’s perks as the director of film studies in the Department of English is having the opportunity to host members of the film industry when they speak on campus.
Fay has coordinated several speakers for next term, including Detroit native and New York-based film critic Armond White.
Most recently, Fay was a university liaison for acclaimed documentary filmmaker Ken Burns, who conducted a student workshop and presented the 2009 College of Arts and Letters Signature Lecture at the Wharton Center.
“That’s one of my privileges of being director of film studies; I get to pal around with Ken Burns,” Fay said.
Fay’s teaching of an undergraduate class led her and fellow faculty member Justus Nieland to write a book on international film noir.
“We’re really interested in the way that film noir itself is a product of globalization, but it also really critiques these neo-liberal developments and the crisis locality that globalization produces,” Fay said.
“This enabled us to both respect the uniqueness of each national iteration of noir and also to think about how these films themselves are circulating as commodities in the very systems of exchange that these films themselves critique.”
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