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Graduate Admissions Graduate Student Profiles |
PhD PROGRAM IN FILM & VISUAL STUDIES The study of film at Harvard has long been conceived as the multi-disciplinary examination of visual experience. From Paul Sachs’s incorporation of film into the academic and curatorial focus of the fine arts at Harvard to Rudolf Arnheim’s consideration of the medium in his investigations of “visual thinking,” and from Hugo Münsterberg’s forays into the psychological reception of moving images to Stanley Cavell’s groundbreaking philosophical approach to the medium, Harvard maintains a long tradition of engaging cinema through the cultural, visual, spatial, and philosophical questions it raises. With their emphases on experimentation in the contemporary arts and creative collaboration among practioners and critics, the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts together provide a lively and unparalleled context for advanced research in Film and Visual Studies. The program aims to foster critical understanding of the interactions between the making of and thinking about film and video, between studio art, performance, and visual culture, and between different arts and pursuits whose objects are aural-visual entities. The Carpenter Center also supports a lively research culture, including the Seminar on Film History/Theory and a Film Workshop for advanced doctoral students, as well as lecture series and exhibitions featuring distinguished artists, filmmakers, and scholars. Interdisciplinary in its impetus, the program draws on and consolidates course offerings in VES and in other departments of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to study film and the spatial arts in all their varieties and to investigate the place of visual arts in the humanities. Graduate students may also take advantage of the significant resources of the Harvard Film Archive (HFA). For more than twenty-five years, the Harvard Film Archive has been a vital resource for advanced research in film through the development of a vast collection of 16mm and 35mm film prints, as well as rare video materials and vintage film posters and promotional materials. The purpose of the archive is to further artistic and academic appreciation of cinema and moving image media within Harvard and the New England community by creating a setting where students and faculty have the opportunity to interact with filmmakers and artists. In early 2003, the HFA opened a new Conservation Center that allows the HFA conservator and staff to accession new films as well as to preserve its diverse collection of independent, international, and silent films. Students in Film and Visual Studies are also eligible to apply to the Harvard Film Study Center for fellowships, awarded annually to graduate students and faculty in support of original film, video, and photographic projects. Established in 1957, the Film Study Center provides production equipment, post-production facilities, technical support, and funding for nonfiction works that interpret the world through images and sounds. Among the many important films to have been produced at the Film Study Center are John Marshall's The Hunters (1956), Robert Gardner's Forest of Bliss (1985), Susan Meiselas, Alfred Guzzetti, and Richard Rogers' Pictures from a Revolution (1991), Irene Lusztig's Reconstruction (2001), Robb Moss's The Same River Twice (2002), and, most recently, Ross McElwee's Bright Leaves (2003). The graduate study of film and visual culture at Harvard is also bolstered by a vibrant undergraduate concentration in Film Studies that offers many opportunities for teaching. Students interested in serving as Teaching Fellows should contact Ruth Lingford, the Director for Undergraduate Studies in Film, lingford [at] fas.harvard.edu. |