New SIG leadership team
Meet your new team!
Several SIG members have agreed to take over as co-Chairs and as our graduate student assistant for the 2022 to 2025 term.
They were elected by attending members during our zoom business meeting on March 25, 2022, and confirmed through a group-wide vote.
The new leadership team members & their contact emails are:
Cortland W. Rankin (co-Chair): rankicw@bgsu.edu
Nathan Blake (co-Chair): n.blake@northeastern.edu
Vivienne Tailor (Graduate Assistant): vivienne.tailor@cgu.edu
Please see their bionotes below:
Cortland Rankin is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Ohio. His primary research interests include the relationship between war cinema and American cultural memory and cinematic representations of postwar American urbanism. His most recent research centers on the cinema and television of the Korean War. He is the author of two chapters on Korean War and Iraq War films as war memorials in Hollywood Remembrance and American War (Routledge, 2020) edited by Andrew Rayment and Paul Nadasdy and his article “Forgettable Films of the Forgotten War: American Cinema and the Erasure of the Korean War” is currently under review at Film History: An International Journal. In the field of cinematic urbanism, he has published an article entitled “Painting the Town Green: From Urban Teleology to Urban Ecology in New York Cinema, 1960-Present” co-authored with Brady Fletcher in NECSUS, European Journal of Media Studies (Spring 2013) and his forthcoming book Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York (Routledge) explores cinematic representations of New York urbanism across mainstream, independent, documentary, and experimental films from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s.
Nathan Blake is a Teaching Professor in Media and Screen Studies at Northeastern University. He has written on motion-capture recording and prosthetic limbs for veterans in Discourse, and is revising a manuscript on the photography and visual systems of World War I. He has taught a number of courses on War and Media as well as Apocalyptic Film and Media. Beginning with a 2020 SCMS presentation on the HBO series Chernobyl, he is currently exploring the relationships between war and the Anthropocene in terms of: 1. the environmental devastation and health effects of war—including the use, production, and disposal of nuclear and chemical weapons; and 2. diminishing extractive resources, the steady rise of climate refugees, and the geopolitical compromises and tensions such crises engender.
Vivienne Tailor earned her Cultural Studies MA (Conc. in Media Studies) from Claremont Graduate University, her Creative Writing MFA (specializing in film studies) from National University, and her English BA with an African American Studies Cert. from the University of Georgia. She has worked and traveled globally, including in China, South Korea, India, Italy, Spain, Mexico, and Colombia, among other nations. Using native language sources, her Comparative Arts research centers on oppressive regime structures, healing trauma through the Arts, and historical amnesia with the reclamation of memory and re/creation of individual and national identities. Her specific research fields include Memory Politics, Transitional Justice, Film Studies, New Historical Criticism, Ghost Studies, and Dead Body Politics. She has published in the International Journal of Humanities, Art, and Social Sciences and currently has several chapters and articles under review at various publications. She has presented at the Black Intersections, InMind, and SCMS conferences and soon will present at the Midwest Political Science Association, 8th World Conference on Women Studies, and American Comparative Literature Association. She will apply for doctoral studies in 2022.