Columbia Scholars Honored by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies
The 2023 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Essay Award Winners have been announced, and several Film and Media Studies alumni and faculty members are among the honorees.
Founded in 1959, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies is the leading scholarly organization in the United States dedicated to promoting a broad understanding of film, television, and related media through research and teaching grounded in the contemporary humanities tradition. SCMS represents nearly 3,000 scholars in over 500 institutions located in 38 nations. Through their conference, journal, awards, and working groups SCMS supports and encourages the humanities-based study of film, television, and related media as centrally important aspects of global culture and creative endeavor.
SCMS sponsors an annual competition for awards that recognize superior performance in pedagogy, scholarship, and service to the field. Maggie Hennefeld was awarded the prize for Best Essay in an Edited Collection for her piece, “Queer Laughter in the Archives of Silent Film Comedy.” Hennefeld’s essay appears in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2021), a collection edited by Senior Lecturer and Concentration Head of the Film and Media Studies MA Program Ron Gregg. Theorizing Colonial Cinema: Reframing Production, Circulation, and Consumption of Film in Asia (Indiana University Press, 2022) took home the prize for the Best Edited Collection, and Professor Jane Gaines’s essay, “World Export: Melodramas of Colonial Conquest” appears in the award-winning collection.
Additionally, Film and Media Studies alumnus Yiyang Hou ’17 was awarded the First Place Prize for Student Writing for his paper, “Going to the Video Hall: A Sensory Encounter with a New Urban Space in Post-Mao China.” In response to receiving this honor, Hou expressed his heartfelt gratitude to his advisor, Michael Berry, and his current and former teachers at UCLA, Columbia, and Stony Brook, extending special thanks to Gaines, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures Ying Qian, Professor Rob King, Jérôme Game, and Associate Professor Nico Baumbach.
Also among this year’s honorees is Tinghao (Timothy) Zhou ’19, who won the Graduate Student Essay Award of the Media and the Environment Scholarly Interest Group at SCMS for his article "Smellscaping Guiyu,” and Dennis (Yifei) Sun ’22, who won the Graduate Student Essay Award in Media, Science, and Technology for his paper "Bridging the Handmade and the Digital: The Tripod Authorship of Computer-Generated Motion Pictures." Zhou is currently an MA/PhD student in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sun’s essay emerged out of the research for his MA thesis at Columbia. He will continue his graduate career as a PhD student at the University of Texas-Austin's Department of Radio-Film-Television in Fall 2023.
To read the full list of award winners, click here.
Yiyang Hou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He received his MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University in 2017. Currently, Yiyang has completed his doctoral dissertation and is actively pursuing his first book project on the cultural history of Chinese popular cinema during the early reform era (1978-1989). A cultural historian by training, Yiyang is broadly interested in all forms of modern and contemporary cultural productions from the Sinophone world. He has contributed to such journals as Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Contemporary Cinema, Fleurs des Lettres, Global Media and China, and Contemporary Animation.
Tinghao Zhou is a third-year PhD student in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University and he completed his bachelor’s degrees in English and Economics in China. His research interests include media theory, environmental humanities and justice, critical infrastructure studies, modern visual culture, and digital culture in East Asia and beyond. He has worked with Prof. Lisa Parks as the graduate research assistant at the Global Media Technologies and Cultures (GMTaC) Lab at UCSB. Currently, he is the coordinating editor of Journal of Media+Environment.
Dennis (Yifei) Sun is a PhD student in Media Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests revolve around new media theory, new media authorship, film philosophy, handmade motion pictures, and the intriguing copyright issue surrounding AI-generated art. Titled "Rethinking Bergson and Deleuze's Theories of Movement - The Material Ontology of Analog and Digital Moving Images, and The Disciplines of Creation in Digital Artworks," his previous article appears in Screen Bodies: The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology (Volume 8 Issue 1, 2023). In light of the historical legal precedents in handmade motion pictures, he is currently engaged in a project that delves into the complex copyright and authorship issues surrounding AI-generated images. With this endeavor, he also seeks to build an archive related to the recent advancements in AI technologies, and explore the influence of copyright matters on the AI artist community in the US and worldwide.