By Charlotte Brookins
Professor Paula Amad of the UI Department of Cinematic Arts, a prolific writer and researcher of film history and its broader cultural implications, will provide the keynote address for the 2023 Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture during the annual meeting of the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada.
The lecture, dedicated to the late British professor Martin Walsh, was founded in 1978 by the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada. The goal of the speech is to encourage the study of cinematic history and the art it provides, especially with consideration to how it affects the world around it.
“It is a true honor to have been invited to deliver the Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture,” says Amad, who chairs the Department of Cinematic Arts. “It feels wonderful to have my research recognized by such an important organization and to be in the company of the leading scholars who have previously delivered this prestigious lecture and whose work I deeply admire.”
Amad's research focuses on the history of early cinema and the forgotten futures that accompanied its emergence. She is currently working on her second book, Cin-aereality: Aerial Vision, Cinema and Modernity, from which she will draw inspiration and content for her upcoming lecture.
“I will most likely be drawing from an early chapter in my current book project in which I trace the affinities between early cinema and aviation across not only a wide array of films (by well-known pioneers like the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès), but also the careers of certain people who straddled the worlds of both aviation and motion pictures,” Amad explains.
She will also be discussing Iowa's F.W. Brinton, who was both an airship inventor and one of the Midwest's first exhibitors of motion pictures. Using her connections to research, the world of cinema, and Iowa, Amad will paint a rich picture of her upcoming book and the extensive research she completed to write it.
The 2023 Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture will happen in May at York University in Toronto. To learn more about Amad and her work, visit her page on the UI Cinematic Arts website.