Meghan Sutherland (On Leave)

Professor Sutherland's research draws on film and television studies, continental philosophy, and political theory to consider the nature of the relation between aesthetic and political forms of representation in a range of different contexts, but with a special emphasis on television, new media, and avant-garde film and video. Along similar lines, the courses she teaches explore stylistic and technological links between visual culture and political discourse, the relation between moving images and the organization of space and place, and the role that popular aesthetic forms play in the constitution of social bodies, in each case attending to both historical and theoretical registers of these relationships to consider the shifting nature of their entwinement.

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Current Research Projects

Professor Sutherland is currently working on a book manuscript called Variety, Democracy, and Spectacle. This study stages a theoretical and historical reappraisal of the spectacular aesthetic codes of variety entertainment—a form it traces from 19^th-century popular theatre to 20^th-century television and 21^st-century Internet platforms such as YouTube—to propose that the aesthetic codes associated with such spectacles, far from simply structuring “empty” or meaningless forms of generic entertainment, in fact play an ontological role in producing the historical referent to which we implicitly point when we engage in any political discourse about who the people are or what they need.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate

CIN 202  An Introduction to Cinema Studies
VCC 309  Society and Spectacle
VCC 340/VCC205  Monsters
VCC 338  Picturing the Suburbs
VCC 400  Advanced Project: Geographies of the Moving Image
VCC 427  Participatory Media

Graduate

CIN 1005  Special Studies in Cinema: Media/Participation
CIN 1005  Special Studies in Cinema: The Society of the Spectacle Today