Browse Our SCMS 2021 Virtual Exhibit Booth

While we are disappointed not to be able to attend the SCMS conference in person, we are very excited to share with you some recent and forthcoming books from our film and media studies list. We are happy to offer a 20 percent discount on all these books; just use the code SCMS when ordering through our website.

The recent resurgence of interest in the work of William Greaves is complemented and enhanced by the publication of William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission, edited by Scott MacDonald and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart. The book is the first comprehensive overview of Greaves’s career and illuminates how his films became a powerful tool for transforming the ways Black Americans were perceived by others and the ways they saw themselves. It includes a rich collection of writings by Greaves as well as critics and scholars. We would also like to add that Columbia University Press has recently launched a new series, Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future in partnership with Howard University, and would love to hear about projects in Black film studies.

We also have three new books from our Film and Culture series that showcase the place of film on the local and global levels. Debashree Mukherjee’s Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City is an ambitious history of Bombay film culture that offers new insights into media, modernity, and how the film industry shaped the late colonial city. Moving a few years ahead and across the globe, “Keep ‘Em in the East”: Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Film Renaissance, by Richard Koszarski describes how New York City’s independent and Black filmmakers as well as studio productions changed the direction of American cinema. Finally, the exertion of and resistance to American cultural influence is told via the history of movie theaters in Ross Melnick’s Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World.

We continue to publish books for students, researchers, and teachers in Wallflower’s Short Cuts series. These short introductory volumes provide focused accounts of key topics in contemporary film studies. This year, Terence McSweeney offers a close reading of recent superhero films in The Contemporary Superhero Film: Projections of Power and Identity, teasing out the ideological content hidden beneath the special effects. Karen McNally returns to classical Hollywood by examining Tinseltown’s long history of self-mythologizing through narratives of the meteoric rise (and fall) of movie stars in The Stardom Film: Creating the Hollywood Fairy Tale. And Warren Buckland’s Narrative and Narration: Analyzing Cinematic Storytelling provides a concise, clear, and thorough overview of narrative strategies in film, from classical Hollywood to contemporary “puzzle films.”

From our media studies list, we’d like to highlight Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University, in which Reinhold Martin provides a compelling history of the university as a media complex. The question of how humanists can critically understand how information has shaped us and society is taken up in two new anthologies: Information: A Reader, edited by Eric Hayot, Anatoly Detwyler, and Lea Pao, and Information: Keywords, edited by Michele Kennerly, Samuel Frederick, and Jonathan E. Abel.