Carolyn Jacobs '15 Receives SCMS Award for ‘Sanitizing Cinema’
Film and Media Studies alum Carolyn Condon Jacobs ’15 has received this year’s Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Dissertation Award for her piece, Sanitizing Cinema: Public Health and the Regulation of American Motion Pictures, 1896-1920.
“I am thrilled and honored to have been recognized by SCMS for my dissertation,” said Jacobs. “I am incredibly grateful for all of the support I had along the way from advisors and colleagues from Yale and Columbia, as well as from friends and family.”
The award, which includes a prize of $1,000, celebrates dissertations that raise the understanding of film, television, or media studies. The award will be formally presented at a ceremony in April during the 2025 SCMS Annual Conference in Chicago.
Jacobs’s piece is a deep dive into a time in which both film and health were experiencing a revolution in the public mind. “In the early twentieth century, we see a massive PR campaign around germs that encouraged people to understand the world in terms of disease transmission,” said Jacobs. “I wanted to look back at this period and see if this new awareness of disease shaped the practices of moviegoing as film developed as a mass medium and an industry.”
The project took on a surprising new relevance during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It felt surreal to be living through the kind of situation that I had just spent a year researching,” recalled Jacobs. “One lesson I learned through it all is that health crises can really clarify the social purpose of film.”
Though much had changed in the last century, Jacobs discovered some important similarities in the ways each health crisis instigated change in the film industry.
“After the flu pandemic, there was massive industrial consolidation,” explained Jacobs. “The process of vertical integration sped up exponentially in the wake of the pandemic because companies were able to buy up theaters whose owners were struggling after lockdowns.”
The familiar narrative was mirrored in the fallout from the 2020 pandemic. “During COVID, we saw a significant rise in the availability of streaming media, which allowed us to have access to entertainment during a stressful time and which, I think, we were all pretty grateful for. However, that growth in streaming services and move away from theatrical film has continued even as the pandemic recedes into the background of our daily lives.”
For Jacobs, it was one of many discoveries made during her exploration of a topic as relevant today as it was a hundred years past. “Health crises have major shifts on our media landscape. However, because health crises are ephemeral and tend to be quickly forgotten when the risk dissipates, we don't always realize that these changes came about because of health emergencies.”
Jacobs is currently in the process of turning the dissertation into a book. Her work has also been featured in Feminist Media Histories, the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television, In Media Res, and the Women Film Pioneers Project. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Central Connecticut State University.