‘My father always promised me that we would live in France’:

a talk by:
Michael B. Gillespie
Associate Professor of Film
Department of Media & Communication Arts
Black Studies Program
The City College of New York

Organized by the MA Program in American Studies at the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race and the American Studies Program at Barnard College

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Research in African American Studies

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Michael B. Gillespie is a film theorist and historian with an interest in black visual and expressive culture, film theory, genre, visual historiography, global cinema, adaptation theory, popular music studies, and contemporary art. His book, Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016) frames black film alongside literature, music, art, photography, and new media, treating it as an interdisciplinary form that enacts black visual and expressive culture. The book shifts the ways we think about black film, treating it not as a category, genre, or strictly a representation of the black experience but as a visual negotiation between film as art and the discursivity of race.

Dr. Gillespie has published numerous essays and book chapters including “Grace and Grind: Notes on the Work of Kevin Jerome Everson” – How to Remain Human  (Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 2015) and “Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin, Film Blackness, and the Racial Grotesque,” – Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies. ed. Mia Mask (Routledge, 2012). Dr. Gillespie has presented over 30 talks and lectures and delivered over 22 academic papers at conferences in national and international venues. He has organized numerous academic panels on black visual and expressive culture for meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, American Studies Association, and Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present. His most recent research project is entitled Music of My Mind: Blackness and Sonic Visuality.

For more information, please contact:

Matt Sandler, Ph.D.

212-854-3248

www.mfsandler.com

mfs2001@columbia.edu