John Powers, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, has won the 2024 award with his book, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture.
Since 1971, The Society for Cinema and Media Studies has annually honored the year's best in cinema and media studies scholarship, teaching, and professional service. As the leading scholarly organization in the US dedicated to promoting a broad understanding of film, television, and related media through research and teaching grounded in the contemporary humanities tradition, SCMS encourages excellence in scholarship and pedagogy and fosters critical inquiry into the global, national, and local circulation of cinema, television, and other related media.
Powers’s award-winning book, Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture, examines how the avant-garde embraced the material resources of small-gauge media technologies, such as the Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers, and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture. His work uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities.
In addition to Powers’s award, former FMS master’s student Garrett Strpko, currently a PhD candidate in Communication Arts-Film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, came in third for the 2025 Student Writing Award with an essay entitled, “Frames of War in Inglourious Basterds (2009).”
The 2024–2025 Awards will be presented at the 2025 SCMS Conference, April 3-6, 2025, in Chicago.
Congratulations!
To read the official announcement: https://www.cmstudies.org/page/2025_awards
To learn more about Powers’s book and/or to purchase: Oxford University Press
