Unit for
Cinema
Studies
Cinema
Studies
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Unit for
Cinema Studies |
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About the Unit for Cinema Studies At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the historical, critical, and aesthetic study of film - Cinema Studies - is pursued in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The development and coordination of film studies is the responsibility of the interdisciplinary Unit for Cinema Studies. Film courses have been offered at illinois, off and on, since the 1930s and were first offered on a regular basis in the 1960s. In 1974, the Unit for Cinema Studies was established in the newly formed School of Humanities, and in 1979, the Cinema Studies Concentration was created within the Humanities Major (now the Interdisciplinary Studies Major). A formal Minor in Cinema Studies is also available. Although there is no formal graduate degree program in Cinema Studies, graduate students in various humanities departments include Cinema Studies courses in their curricula and write dissertations on cinema topics within the contexts of their primary discipline. A Graduate Minor in Cinema Studies was created in early 2006. The approach of the Unit and the Cinema Studies Concentration is strongly international and strongly interdisciplinary. Students acquire a broad, general knowledge of cinema, with an emphasis on foreign cinema in addition to the emphasis on Hollywood found in more traditional programs. Courses and regularly offered topics within open topics courses focus on the cinemas of France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Sweden, China, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Currently, Cinema Studies courses and topics are originated and offered by the Unit under the CINE rubric and by eleven departments and programs (Anthropology, African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Comparative and World Literature, English, French, Germanic Languages and Literature, History, Philosophy, Slavic Languages and Literature, Spanish Italian and Portuguese, Speech Communication) under seventeen additional rubrics (with most of those courses cross-listed under the CINE rubric). The Unit cooperates closely with other agencies on campus such as the University Library and the Office of Instructional Resources to develop local research and teaching resources in film. The Unit is also the major moving force on campus for an extensive series of film-related activities. It sponsors a cinematheque film series in its screening facility in 101 Armory to supplement film courses and to broaden generally the cinema background of students and faculty, and it has brought U.S. and foreign scholars and filmmakers to campus, as well as film retrospectives from a wide range of countries, including China, Australia, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Belgium, Russia, Poland, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Japan, and South Africa. In 1982, the Unit was the first unit in the humanities to be granted the prestigious Beckman Award, presented to illinois research projects of special merit. The Unit has received national recognition for the quality of its program and has served as a model for other universities developing their own programs in Cinema Studies. The faculty of the Unit for Cinema Studies have individually achieved national and international reputations for their research in various areas of the discipline and for their other scholarly activities. [If you are interested in assisting the Unit in its educational mission through a gift, the LAS Office of Development will be happy to assist you.]
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