Laura Mulvey to speak March 4

Influential film theorist Laura Mulvey, professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck College, University of London, will discuss “Modernity and Obsolescence: The Use of Rear Projection in Film” at 4 p.m. Friday, March 4, for the Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences.

The talk is free and open to the public and will take place in Room 300 of the Laboratory Sciences Building. For more information, call (314) 935-5576 or e-mail cenhum@wustl.edu.

Born in Oxford in 1941, Mulvey came to prominence in the early 1970s, writing on feminist theory, semiotics and psychoanalysis for film periodicals such as Spare Rib and Seven Days. She is perhaps best known for the germinal essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1973), which explored questions relating to spectatorial identification and the male gaze, and which arguably helped establish feminist film theory as a field of study.

In addition, between 1974-1982, Mulvey co-wrote and co-directed six experimental films in collaboration with her husband, Peter Wollen. These include Riddles of the Sphinx (1978), AMY! (1980) and Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (1980). In the early 1990s, she returned to filmmaking with Disgraced Monuments (1994), a collaboration with the artist and filmmaker Mark Lewis.

Mulvey’s books include Visual and Other Pleasures (1989; second edition 2009), Citizen Kane (1996) and Fetishism and Curiosity (1996). Her most recent book is Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (2006), which examines the role of new media technologies in the viewer’s experience of film.

2011 Faculty Fellows

Mulvey’s talk is presented as part of the Center for the Humanities’ 2011 Faculty Fellows 
Lecture and Workshop Series.

Each spring, the Faculty Fellows program offers semester-long research fellowships to tenured and tenure-track faculty members in Arts & Sciences in order to provide them with a supportive environment for innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship and research. Faculty fellows, who are selected by a panel of university faculty aided by evaluations from outside reviewers, are relieved of all teaching and administrative duties for that semester in order to pursue significant research projects that will have an impact on humanities scholarship or humanities teaching.

Mulvey was invited to lecture by two current faculty fellows, Lutz Koepnick, PhD, professor of German, of film and media studies and of comparative literature; and Anca Parvulescu, PhD, assistant professor in both the Department of English in Arts & Sciences and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities.

Subsequent events in the Faculty Fellows Lecture and Workshop Series will include:

March 22: Parvulescu will discuss “The Televised Revolution, or Why the Revolution Needs Its Dead.”

March 29: Linda Nicholson, PhD, the Susan E. and William P. Stiritz Distinguished Professor of Women’s Studies and professor of history in Arts & Sciences, will discuss “Identity in a Complex Time.”

April 14: Linda Martín Alcoff, PhD, professor of philosophy at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center, will discuss “Social Identities and the Question of Realism.”