Professor M贸nica L贸pez Lerma Calls 鈥淎ction!鈥 for Reed鈥檚 New Film & Media Studies Major
As the committee chair of the program, L贸pez Lerma is building a curriculum that is as interdisciplinary as it is international.
Reports of cinema’s death at the hands of streaming have been greatly exaggerated—just ask Professor Mónica López Lerma [Spanish and humanities]. “We are having the same conversations, more or less, every time that a new technology emerges,” she says. “I don’t think [streaming] is the end of cinema.”
As the committee chair of Reed’s film and media studies program, López Lerma is building a curriculum as interdisciplinary as it is international—and showing how film studies can play an integral role in a liberal arts education.
“Mainstream cinema is shaping our ways of seeing, our ways of feeling, our ways of thinking,” she says. “We need to understand how our ways of seeing are shaped—and that’s what film and media studies does.”
Launched in fall 2024, film and media studies was more than 10 years in the making at Reed. The program spotlights the history, theory, and criticism of film and other communications media, with emphasis on cinema as a global language.
That focus is reflected in specialized courses ranging from Hong Kong Cinema to Science Fiction in Soviet Literature and Film—and López Lerma hopes to expand the program’s scope. “It should be more international, more diversified than it is,” she says.
While the study of film history and theory is the core of film and media studies, López Lerma intends for the program to benefit students who wish to make their own films with the help of courses like Digital Video and Coding Interactivity.
“So many faculty are involved,” López Lerma says. “People from the German department, French, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, from the arts. That says a lot about Reed, that we are able to collaborate, to work together to create something. That’s the beauty of it.” —Bennett Campbell Ferguson
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