Film and Media Studies Guest Speaker Series
The Department of English’s Film and Media Studies Guest Speaker Series brings artists, industry executives, and scholars to ASU for presentations or short residencies throughout the academic year.
Upcoming Events
Panel discussion: The Future of Television: Social Justice and Media Industries
ASU’s Film and Media Studies program is hosting a panel discussion with a diverse range of TV industry practitioners. This dialogue event will explore the industry’s possibilities, responsibilities, and obligations in a moment of pivotal change, centering on how television is responding to pressures from the #MeToo movement, calls for racial justice, and changes to filmmaking practices due to Covid-19. Faculty from the Film and Media Studies Program in the Department of English at ASU will guide the discussion, following a set of key questions: how can television remain a central site for the deliberation over questions of community, racial justice, and protest? How is the industry responding to public demands for more diversity and inclusion in front and behind the camera? Is greater inclusion central to the future of television’s appeal for audiences?
Featuring: Ro Haber, Alex Stapleton, Peter Murietta, Fanshen Cox, Vera Miao
When: Monday, February 21, 6pm with refreshments served afterwards
Where: ASU California Center (1111 S. Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90015)
For questions, please contact Film and Media Studies director Julia Himberg
Working Through the Archives of Latinx Ecomedia
Join us for a guest lecture and discussion with Carlos Alonso Nugent on “Working Through the Archives of Latinx Ecomedia.” The talk will describe how migrant farmworkers and their allies have reimagined and reshaped the U.S.–Mexico food system. By working through radio broadcasts, documentary films, and serial publications, Carlos argues that the UFW helped publics see, hear, smell, touch, and taste otherwise imperceptible problems. Then, by showing how United Farm Workers (UFW) media shaped the form and content of Victor Villaseñor’s Macho! (1973), Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints (1994), and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), he demonstrates that it permanently changed public conversations about socioeconomic inequality and ecological toxicity. This troubles the widespread tendency to define Latinx environmental justice activists as inheritors to—or imitators of—white environmentalists. At the very moment that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) linked a singular author to solitary readers, Latinx ecomedia catalyzed conversations across a much more diverse range of communities. In the following decades, the media allowed these communities to continue caring about—and fighting for—places they had never visited and people they had never met.
The talk will be followed by a discussion and Q&A session led by respondent Lee Bebout, professor of English at ASU and affiliate faculty with the School of Transborder Studies and the Program in American Studies. The event is supported by the Desert Humanities Initiative and the ASU Department of English.
Carlos Alonso Nugent is an Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. His research and teaching interests include 19th- and 20th-century U.S. culture, 19th- and 20th-century Latinx culture, critical race and ethnic studies, and the environmental humanities. His current book project is a literary, cultural, and environmental history of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands from 1848 to the present. A piece of this project, entitled “Lost Archives, Lost Lands: Rereading New Mexico’s Imagined Environments,” received the Norman Foerster Prize for Best Essay of the Year in American Literature. Nugent is particularly pleased to be presenting at Arizona State University, for he grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Website: https://www.carlosalonsonugent.com/
When/Where:
Thursday February 24, 2022 at 4 PM, MU 242 and live-streamed over Zoom.
PAST EVENTS
A Visit by Whit Stillman, writer and film director
Monday, March 27, 2017 :: Love and Friendship Reading/Booksigning
7 p.m. | Changing Hands Phoenix (300 W Camelback Rd) Phoenix, AZ
Tuesday, March 28, 2017 :: Metropolitan Screening/Q&A
7 p.m. | Harkins Valley Art Theatre (509 S Mill Ave) Tempe, AZ
Both events are free of charge and open to the public.
Printable flyer: 
whit-stillman-2017-final.pdf
Michael Phillips, Film Critic, Chicago Tribune (March 1, 2017). Printable flyer: PDF
Miranda Banks, Assoc. Professor, Emerson College (February 9, 2017). Printable flyer: PDF
Clark Spencer, Zootopia Producer (March 2, 2016). Printable flyer: JPG
Rob Thompson, Animation Artist, Disney-Pixar (November 5, 2015). Printable flyer: JPG
Kitior Ngu, Rackham Merit Fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (April 1, 2015). Printable flyer: PDF
John T. Caldwell, Filmmaker and Prof., UCLA (February 13, 2015). Printable flyer: PDF
Charles E. Eglee, Producer and Screenwriter, 'The Walking Dead,' 'The Shield,' 'Dexter,' and 'Hemlock Grove' (November 25, 2014).
John Heinsen, CEO, Bunnygraph; VP, New Media, Producers Guild of America (October 21, 2014).
Marlon Wayans, Actor, Writer and Producer, 'A Haunted House 2' (March 26, 2014).
Zal Batmanglij, Director/Screenwriter, and Brit Marling, Screenwriter/Actress, 'The East' (April 25, 2013).
Derek Johnson, Assist. Prof., Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison (April 18, 2013).
Tamara Falicov, Assoc. Prof., Univ. of Kansas (April 8, 2013).
James Mitchell, Assist. Dean & Assoc. Prof., Salve Regina Univ. (February 25, 2013).
Jonathan Levine, Director, and Dave Franco, Star, 'Warm Bodies' (January 16, 2013).
Kristen Warner, Assist. Prof., Univ. of Alabama (September 25, 2012).
Olivia Thirlby, Actor, 'Dredd 3D' (September 14, 2012).
Dan Harkins, CEO, Harkins Theatres (November 15, 2011).
John Cho and Kal Penn, Actors, 'A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas' (October 24, 2011).
Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, Actors, 'Like Crazy' (September 30, 2011).
Barney Rosenzweig, Creator, 'Cagney and Lacey' (September 26, 2011).
Julianne Hough and Kenny Wormald, Actors, 'Footloose' (September 20, 2011).
Robert Chapek, President of Distribution, Walt Disney (April 13, 2011).
Yaniv Fituci, Associate Producer, G4 (April 5, 2011).
Dan Harkins, CEO, Harkins Theatres (April 1, 2011).
Patrick Brogan, Publicist, Allied (March 23, 2011).
Jane Seymour, Actress (February 8, 2011).
Brian Levant, Producer and Director (September 21, 2010).
For more information about this series, please contact Prof. Kevin Sandler: Kevin.Sandler@asu.edu