Release Date: 02-25-2005
Author: Kevin Foley
Email: Kevin.Foley@uvm.edu
Responding to student demand and faculty interest, the Department of English is launching a new major in film and television studies next year. The program, which recently received final approval from the board of trustees, will extend and replace the program’s existing film minor.
“Film and television are hugely important in our culture, and we see it as the mission of English studies to focus on all kinds of texts,” says Robyn Warhol, professor and chair of English, who says the new major will build on the work of Frank Manchel, a popular professor emeritus of film.
Todd McGowan, assistant professor of English, will direct the program; other core faculty include Assistant Professor Hilary Neroni, whose planning work was instrumental in launching the new major, and colleagues Sarah Nilsen and David Jenemann. Like the older film minor, the new major will also incorporate faculty from outside the department.
The new program will emphasize critical theory (many of the core faculty are experts in cultural studies) as it seeks to deepen students’ understanding of film. But McGowan says the course requirements will combine to give students a historical sense of the medium, some background in production, and a strong sense of the vocabulary of the medium. The program, he says, is less flexible than a traditional English major.
“It can be more difficult to talk about film than literature,” he says. ”Literature has a form that is much more self-evident, but we often don’t interact with film as a form, there can be this sense that we’re seeing what actually happened… Hilary Neroni teaches a class that combines theory with production. Students read about the theory of, say, montage, and then they put their own shots together and make one. In some ways, that class encapsulates our major.”
Neroni began working on the new major shortly after arriving on campus in 1999. Then, with support from Joan Smith, the late dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, an outside group of experts came in and evaluated a program outline. Eventually, after much discussion at the department and Faculty Senate levels, the new program was approved. The first students enroll next fall, and as many as five will graduate in the program in the spring by building on credits earned through the minor or independent study. McGowan expects the program to grow dramatically from there.
“There has been a groundswell of student interest. Every year, many of the film minors say they would have majored in film if that was an option,” he says. "I think this is going to be very popular."
