The honors seminar will allow students to become acquainted with a central theoretical issue in film and television studies and to write an academic research article. The seminar is for outstanding students in film studies who are considering graduate studies after completing their BA or BFA.

This year’s seminar will engage with cinematic experiences that are ostensibly not pleasurable such as disgust, boredom, and sadness, and which characterize certain genres, notably the “art” film and the avant-garde, melodrama, and horror. Using diverse methods, we will ask how certain moving-image texts arouse such feelings; what their social and political significance might be; and why we are willing to watch (and even pay to watch) such texts and perhaps even derive some sort of pleasure out of them.

The seminar papers will be written as academic research articles. The students will also serve as an editorial board for an academic journal, refereeing their peers’ work and revising and preparing their own papers for publication. Articles that will be accepted by the editorial board and lecturer will be published in the department’s film journal.