Intimate Publics: 2026 Film and Media Studies Graduate Conference

Please join us for the Film and Media Studies Program's annual Graduate Student Conference. This year's title is Intimate Publics and the presentations will be centered around questions about the relationship between intimacy, public culture, and media studies. We will have a variety of presenters discussing topics such as surveillance, pornography, affect studies, national cinemas, found footage filmmaking, genre film, fan studies, and more. Our keynote address will be delivered by Prof. Mary Hennessy (University of Wisconsin Madison). Friday September 18th - Cathedral of Learning 501 ● 9:30-10:00am - Registration and Coffee ○ Sign in and collect your name badges ● 10:00-10:30am - Welcome Address from David Pettersen ● 10:30am-12pm - Panel 1 - Private Eyes: Home Movies, Found Footage, and (Re)Circulation ○ Faculty Moderator - Raed El Rafei ○ Hugo Ljungbäck, University of Chicago - “Private Visions? Parody, Visibility, and Community in Jerett Robert Austin’s Camille” ○ Yasaman Baghban, University of Rochester - “Archival Intimacy: Found Footage in Contemporary Iranian Short Essay Films” ○ Elayne McGrail, University of Pittsburgh - “‘Sharenting’, Surveillance, and the Fractured Home Video” ○ Kelly Daniela Norris, University of Texas at Austin - “Autotheory: Activation of the Mediated Self in the Home Movies Archive” ● 12:00-2:30pm - LUNCH BREAK ● 2:30-4:00pm - Panel 2 - Moving Images: Space, Movement, and Feeling ○ Faculty Moderator - Randall Halle ○ Milad Sotoudeh, Cornell University - “The Impossible Present and Feeling a Queer Future in Sexual Moments of Iranian Cinema” ○ Jason Kelly, CUNY Brooklyn College - “The Reflexive Transformation of Mobile Space into a Subaltern Counterpublic in Jafar Panahi’s Taxi (2015)” ○ Alice Guillot-Lefeuvre, Université Lumière Lyon 2 - “Images of loss, family grief and AIDS in Julia Ducournau’s Alpha (2025)” ○ Jessica Huang-Yichen, Columbia University - “Theatrical Artifactuality a