Announcing Our 2020 Film, Media, and Journalism Studies Catalog

Letter from the editors:

We are pleased to be sharing with you Columbia University Press’s 2020 Film, Media, and Journalism Studies catalog. The books featured here reflect the press’s commitment to publishing innovative works examining the multifaceted ways in which film, media, and journalism shape and are shaped by shifting historical, political, and artistic contexts.

First off, congratulations to Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe on receiving the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award for their book Chromatic Modernity. Published in the Film and Culture series, their book is joined by several new titles for the series, ranging from Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle, which provides a panoramic view of the early days of the Bombay film industry, to Nick Jones’s Spaces Mapped and Monstrous, which explores the aesthetics and technologies of 3D cinema. Other books include Virginia Wexman on the Directors Guild of America and the rise of the director as “author,” Sarah Keller on our anxious love for cinema, Malcolm Turvey on Jacques Tati, and Justin Remes on films that foreground what is absent. We are also happy to announce the second edition of our bestselling textbook, Film Studies by Ed Sikov.

Two other books investigate the political implications of film on and off the screen. Claudia Breger’s Making Worlds examines how contemporary European films produce new ways of thinking about collectivity. Meanwhile, Eithne Quinn’s A Piece of the Action takes aim at Hollywood’s failure to integrate in the post-civil rights era.

We also continue to publish books for film scholars, students, and cinephiles through our Wallflower imprint. Perpetrator Cinema: Confronting Genocide in Cambodian Documentary, by Raya Morag, examines the work of filmmakers such as Rithy Panh, who focus on confrontations between survivors and perpetrators of genocide. Kathleen Cummins takes up the revisionist feminist western in Herstories on Screen; and Terence McSweeney provides a concise and comprehensive introduction to the global phenomenon that is the superhero film in his new contribution to the Short Cuts series. The acclaimed Italian director Paolo Sorrentino is the subject of the latest entry in the Directors’ Cuts series, written by Russell Kilbourn, which focuses on the tension between stylish postmodernity and political heft in Sorrentino’s films. It is also a bittersweet pleasure to announce the final installment in our Cultographies series, on Jack Smith’s notorious and oft-censored Flaming Creatures, by Constantine Verevis.

New books in journalism studies view the field’s past and possible future. Legendary magazine designers Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser look back at their career in Mag Men. Francesco Marconi examines the possibilities and limits of artificial intelligence in journalism. Finally, we are very proud to be publishing The Perilous Public Square: Structural Threats to Free Expression Today, edited by David E. Pozen, in conjunction with the Knight First Amendment Institute. We hope you share our enthusiasm for these books and look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you for interest and support.

Sincerely,
Philip Leventhal, senior editor film, media, and journalism studies
Ryan Groendyk, editor for Wallflower