May 9, 2014
On Tuesday, May 6, 2014, the Hamilton College faculty yet again voted upon the fate of a concentration. The members of the faculty unanimously decided to approve the creation of a new concentration, Cinema & Media Studies. While the College currently offers a program and a minor in “Cinema & New Media Studies,” this motion expands upon the discipline in place and, accordingly, renames it.
The existing program and minor were voted in five years ago, in 2009, and in recent years, student interest in the area has increased: this is evident according to the growing number of students both declaring the minor and designing original interdisciplinary concentrations that resemble the new discipline. “For these reasons, the faculty think there will strong interest in the concentration among students,” said Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of Faculty Patrick Reynolds. “I understand from Admissions that many prospective students inquire about film or cinema studies also.”
“The study of cinema at Hamilton is far from being new,” Professor of French Martine Guyot-Bender expressed. She noted that events and activities relating to cinema have long been a part of several academic departments and the Hamilton community, taking the form of the Sunday F.I.L.M. series, largely curated by Visiting Professor of Art History Scott MacDonald, and various cultural festivals, such as those sponsored by the Chinese, Hispanic Studies and French departments. These and other campus events, she said, “testify of a broad student and faculty interest in cinema as a basis for intellectual and artistic inquiry.”
The Cinema & Media Studies concentration will be an interdisciplinary program beginning in the upcoming Fall 2014 semester and will be a concentration option for students in the Class of 2017 and onward. The concentration will not be a professional cinema school, of course: concentrators will be required to take courses in several academic areas that are closely connected to cinema for a comprehensive understanding. The courses that contribute to the concentration will stem from many different departments, including Art History, French, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Religious Studies, English, Communication, Art and so on. These various disciplines represent a wide range of courses in the humanities, social sciences and arts, making this concentration, in the words of Dean Reynolds, “among the broadest of our 15 or so interdisciplinary programs.”
“It is a major that fits perfectly the Liberal Arts vocation of the college, and, for that matter, several of the academic goals.”
During its meeting on Tuesday, the new concentration’s committee—comprised of Professors Guyot-Bender, Humphries-Brooks, MacDonald, Nieves, Omori and O’Neill—declared three immediate goals for the concentration: to develop “critical attention to and analysis of cinema and media, to engage “with the ways… social and physical forces are represented and explored in cinema and media studies” and to analyze “the uses of technology in representing and constructing knowledge.”
In addition to meeting student demand for an academic emphasis on cinema and media studies, the new concentration will provide more opportunities for classes to take advantage of on-campus resources, such as the Wellin Museum and the Kevin and Karen Kennedy Studio Arts Center.
No doubt Dean Reynolds speaks for the entire Hamilton faculty when he expresses enthusiasm for the new major. “In the longer view, there have been faculty members at Hamilton working to develop the curriculum pertaining to cinema for at least a decade,” he said. “It is interesting to note how long it takes for curricular programs to develop, and reflects the care that the faculty takes in deciding on curricular changes.”
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