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Faculty Fellow

Allyson Nadia Field

Associate Professor, Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College University of Chicago

Biography

Allyson Nadia Field

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Allyson Nadia Field’s scholarship contributes to evolving areas of study that investigate the functioning of race and representation in interdisciplinary contexts surrounding cinema. Her primary research interest is in African American film, both silent era cinema and more contemporary filmmaking practices, and is unified by two broad theoretical inquiries: how film and visual media shape perceptions of race and ethnicity, and how these media have been and can be mobilized to perpetuate or challenge social inequities. Her work is grounded in sustained archival research, integrating that material with concerns of film form, media theory, and broader cultural questions of representation. She is the author of Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film & The Possibility of Black Modernity (Duke University Press, 2015) and, with Jan-Christopher Horak and Jacqueline Stewart, co-editor of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema (University of California Press, 2015).

To learn more about Field's research and publications, please see her profile page at the Department of Cinema and Media Studies.

Featured Project

A sugar-cast pair of Nike Air Jordans

Slavery and Visual Culture

Project Topics:

2020 – 2023

Projects

Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives

Titus Kaphar, Behind the Myth of Benevolence, 2014.

Visual Regimes of Enslavement and Their Afterlives

This project will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten or organized contemporary modes of seeing black bodies.
This project gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars who, in the context of closed seminars, public events, and digital exhibits, will investigate how visual practices fostered during the slaveholding era in the circum-Atlantic world have underwritten modes of seeing Black bodies beyond ...