BA Cinema and Media Studies

For more than a century, and across widely different cultures, film has been the primary medium for storytelling, for depicting and exploring the world, and for engaging and shaping the human senses and emotions, memory and imagination. We live in a time in which cinema, the theatrical exhibition of films to a paying public, is no longer the primary venue in which films are consumed. But cinema seems to survive, even as it is being transformed by television, video, and digital media; and these media, in turn, are giving rise to new forms of moving image culture.

At the same time, the goal is to situate the cinema (and related media) in broader contexts. These include the formation of visual culture and the history of the senses; modernity, modernism, and the avant-garde; narrative theory, poetics, and rhetoric; commercial entertainment forms and leisure and consumer culture; sexuality and gender; constructions of ethnic, racial, and national identities; and transnational media production and circulation, as well as the emergence of global media publics.