The variety of working and research groups at Concordia have the purpose of bringing faculty and graduate students from different fields together under specific research interests. Here are some of the ones that feature grad students and faculty from MHSoC. You’ll be able to find more information on these and other research groups in our Links > Working and Research Groups page.

ARTHEMIS

The Advanced Research Team on History and Epistemology of Moving Image Study, is a project housed at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema dedicated to the study of the evolution of film studies as a discipline. Our object of study is not the cinema per se but the discourses and practices that surround it, and in particular those discourses and practices that have served as conditions of possibility for learned or academic considerations of film.

The research team is directed by Dr. Martin Lefebvre. Members include: Dr. Charles Acland (Concordia Research Chair in Communications), Dr. Michael Cowan (German Studies, McGill), Dr. Yuriko Furuhata (East Asian Studies, McGill), John Hunting (English, Dawson College), Dr. Julianne Pidduck (Communications, UdeM), Dr. Catherine Russell (Cinema, Concordia), Dr. Masha Salazkina (Concordia Research Chair in Transnational Media Arts and Culture), Dr. Marc Steinberg (Cinema, Concordia), Dr. Haidee Wasson (Cinema, Concordia).

Contact Eric Prince.

The Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories

The Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories is an open network of film scholars interested in excavating and re-reading historical contributions and debates on film. Special attention is devoted to early writings on cinema as well as more recent reconsiderations of film’s role in the new media landscape. In addition, the Seminar is committed to promoting the translation, preservation, and distribution of writing and media relevant to the study of cinema. Through the Translation Project, the Seminar seeks to provide accessible English translations of writings on film theory and related topics, with special emphasis on writings from cinema’s early decades.

The Seminar invites interested scholars to suggest possible texts for inclusion. They are particularly interested in texts originating from areas not traditionally included in the canon of writings on cinema. If you have any further questions or interests in this project, you can contact Dr. Masha Salazkina.

Sense Lab

The Sense Lab | A Laboratory for Though in Motion is composed of artists, academics, researchers, dancers, and writers working together to explore the active passage between research and creation. The Lab considers research to be creation in germ, and creation to produce its own concepts for thought. The Lab holds monthly reading groups, a bi-monthly speaker-series entitled Bodies-Bits///Corps-Données – a platform for the exploration of work in progress both local and international – as well as a series of international events entitled Technologies of Lived Abstraction. Each of these events are conceived as vehicles for the exploration of modes of participation that take thought as their laboratory for creative practice and creative practice as a platform for thought.

All are welcome. We are located at Concordia University (Hexagram) in EV 11-625, 11-655. The person of contact for the Sense Lab is Dr. Erin Manning.

Sound Studies Working Group

In the course of the last thirty years, a number of scholars in cinema and media studies, as well as in the humanities and social sciences at large, have challenged the centrality given to  “the visual” in our social and cultural lives by pointing out that sound plays an equally important role in our experience and understanding of the world. The choice of multidisciplinary approaches is required by the parameters of this domain of inquiry, as the object of study is never sound alone, but rather the relationships that hold or emerge between sound and the visual medium with which it comes into interaction.

This working group brings together scholars and graduate students from a variety of academic departments to allow for a new forum for interdisciplinary work that has sound as its center in order to learn and share our respective disciplinary expertise and approaches. The working group also includes a reading group; presentations of work-in-progress by faculty and graduate students working in sound studies at Concordia, McGill, and Carleton University, as well as talks by invited speakers – past speakers included Dr. Neepa Majumdar (Pittsburgh) and Dr. Jonathan Sterne (McGill). The group is open to scholars already working in sound studies, and those who are interested in incorporating approaches to sound into their research and teaching.

Members of the working group: Elena Razlogova (History), Catherine Russell (Film), Masha Salazkina (Film), Chris Salter (Design and Computation Arts), Marc Steinberg (Film). The main contact for this working group is Dr. Masha Salazkina.

Screen Cultures Research Group

The Screen Cultures Research Group (SCRG) has been working to advance cross-disciplinary, inter-faculty, discussion about screen culture since 2006 and has acted as a vehicle for graduate students and faculty located in several departments to meet and share research in process that relates to issues of screen materiality. Our series of events have an explicitly international focus, with attention placed on the global historical impact of screen technologies.  The sessions are designed to be a conversation among faculty members, including researchers directly involved in screen studies as well as those with a developing interest in these topics. Graduate students whose research intersects with the workshop are invited to attend.

Faculty members include Charles Acland (Communications), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Art History), Bart Simon (Sociology), Haidee Wasson (Cinema). The main contact for SCRG is Charles Acland.