The Department of Cinema and Media Studies (CMS) takes an expansive and multifaceted approach to its study of cinema. The Department’s scholarship encompasses works on film as well as new forms such as television, video, and digital media, analyzing them in historical, theoretical, and cultural terms while also giving careful attention to aesthetic style and practice. Although students may take all of their coursework in CMS, many expand their study into overlapping subjects like Art History, Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, English Language and Literature, Gender and Sexuality, Romance Languages and Literature, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Theater and Performance Studies, and Visual Arts.
Selected Faculty
Sample Courses
Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies (CMST 40000) Autumn 2026
This course offers an introduction to ways of reading, writing on, and teaching film. The focus of discussion will range from methods of close analysis and basic concepts of film form, technique and style; through industrial/critical categories of genre and authorship (studios, stars, directors); through aspects of the cinema as a social institution, psycho-sexual apparatus and cultural practice; to the relationship between filmic texts and the historical horizon of production and reception. Films discussed will include works by Griffith, Lang, Hitchcock, Deren, Godard.
South Side Home Movies: Amateur Cinema and the Politics of Preservation (CMST 31402) Spring 2026
This course traces the history of home movies on Chicago's South Side as a robust creative, documentation, and screening film practice grounded in everyday life. The course centers on the South Side Home Movie Project, founded by the instructor here at UChicago, which holds more than 1,200 reels from the 1930s-1970s shot by a diverse range of South Side residents. We will look at their scenes of family and community life through the lenses of amateur filmmaking, the South Side’s intense racial segregation, and the rise of a Black middle class. Lectures and discussions with SSHMP staff, donors and collaborators will cover digitization, cataloguing, oral history, public programming, and engagement with filmmaker families, educators, and artists. Students will have opportunities to contribute original research and creative re-use projects to the SSHMP website. (Jacqueline Stewart)
The Archive of Absence: Theories and Methodologies of Evidence (CMST 67812) Autumn 2025
In this graduate seminar we will investigate theories and historiographic methodologies of approaching problems of evidence in film history, with a particular focus on approaches to nonextant film, film fragments, unidentified film, and other “mysteries” of film history. Some of these problems are about gaps: how has film history grappled with the absence and instability of the film artifact? Others, especially in a newly digital world, involve abundance: how can film history and historiography navigate the polyvalences of meaning brought about by an ever-expanding archive? This course will combine theoretical readings, analyses of case studies, and students’ own research. Topics to be covered include the use of extrafilmic evidence and primary paracinematic evidence, fiction and speculative approaches to history, theories of evidence, and archival theories and practices. We’ll also focus on the possibilities and limits of various historiographic methodologies, touching on the use of oral history, biographic research, and official and unofficial discourses. Cases will be drawn from the silent era to contemporary cinema, and from a range of film practices including avant-garde, Classical Hollywood, African American, European art cinema, and others. (Allyson Nadia Field)
A complete listing of offerings is available at the Department’s course page.
Cinema and Media Studies Specialization
The Cinema and Media Studies Specialization allows students to structure their coursework and thesis around the study of Cinema and Media Studies within MAPH. Students who complete the following requirements will receive a Cinema and Media Studies transcript notation:
- MAPH Core course (Foundations of Interpretive Theory).
- Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies or Media Studies.
- History of International Film I and II.
- One or two graduate-level elective courses in the Cinema and Media Studies department.
- A thesis on cinema/media under the supervision of a member of the Cinema and Media Studies faculty.
Please direct any questions you may have about specializing in Cinema and Media Studies to maph-support@uchicago.edu.
Recent Cinema and Media Studies Thesis Projects
"Why Were There No Great American Filmmakers in Chicago?"
Carson Wang, MAPH '26
Advisor: Jacqueline Stewart
"Embedding CBT Processes into Dungeons & Dragons-Style Tabletop Roleplaying Games"
Mathew Rosario, MAPH '26
Advisor: Patrick Jagoda
“Psychedelia in Convolution: Reading Yuya Uchida’s Challenge! (1969) Across Sound and Symbol”
Langyi Ren, MAPH ‘25
Advisor: James Lastra
“You are Filled with (Self)Determination: Undertale, Identification, and the Meta-Avatar”
Rachel Anderson, MAPH ‘25
Advisor: Patrick Jagoda
"Transgender Embodiment Through Genre in Singapore Sling"
Tony George, MAPH '24
Advisor: Allyson Nadia Field
"Towards Aporistic Games"
Vsevolod Khusid, MAPH '24
Advisor: Ashlyn Sparrow