NEH Grant Will Fund Videographic Criticism Workshops
MIDDLEBURY, Vt. – Two faculty members from Middlebury’s Film and Media Culture department have received a major grant from the Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities, a program of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), to continue a videographic criticism workshop they launched as a pilot program in 2015. Professors Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell received the grant, which will fund the two-week summer workshops in 2017 and 2018.
Titled “Scholarship in Sound and Image,” the workshops are designed to help participants learn how to conceive and produce film & media criticism via digital sound and moving images.
“The first workshop, which was also supported by the same NEH grant program, was hugely successful,” said Mittell. “The opportunity to repeat the workshop two more times is wonderful, and we are already thinking about how we will evolve our approach for two new cohorts of participants.”
The 2015 workshop yielded a number of publications in the growing subfield of videographic criticism. Seven of the participants, including Mittell, had videos that they started in Middlebury published in [in]Transition, the journal of videographic criticism that Keathley and Mittell helped to found in 2013. Additionally, in 2016 Keathley and Mittell published a short book, The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, which details the approach taught and issues raised at the workshop.
Due to high demand, the inaugural session in 2015 was only open to participants who had completed their PhD. In 2017, the program will expand to include students enrolled in graduate programs. The 2018 session will require that participants have completed their PhD by the application deadline.
“We hope dividing the applicant pool this way will allow us to reach a broader range of participants, and customize our content for different audiences,” said Mittell.
Details about the upcoming workshops as well as samples of videographic criticism are available on the workshop website.