OHIO students, professor present at Midwest Popular Culture Association conference

Ohio University Professor Matt Wanat of the Lancaster campus was joined by graduate students from the School of Film and School of Interdisciplinary Arts for the annual conference of the Midwest Popular Culture Association in Chicago on Oct. 4-6.

Interdisciplinary Arts Ph.D. candidate Chen Wang’s paper “Damaged Nations and Women as National Allegory: Trans-Generational Wartime Memory in ‘Story of Women and Germany, Pale Mother’” explored trauma and delayed mourning in New German Cinema.

Ph.D. candidate Jonah Mathison-Regan’s “Another Side of New Hollywood: Sidney Lumet and the Institutional Approach to 1970s American Cinema,” challenged prevailing notions about director Lumet’s place in the auteur canon.

And Baldwin Wallace Lecturer and Ohio University Ph.D. candidate Paul Peters’ “Hollywood’s ‘Privileged Gaze’: How Mainstream Movies Construct the American Cultural Status Quo,” brought both quantitative and qualitative analysis to bear on new millennia mainstream Hollywood film.

A professor of English at the Lancaster campus who also teaches courses for film in Athens, Wanat noted, “Our students acquitted themselves professionally with focused, well-articulated, provocative work on a variety of important subjects in the field of Film Studies. I was proud of their work and thoroughly entertained by their presentations.” 

Wanat’s paper, “Ontological Restructuring and the Eighties Implacable Villain,” explored cultural contexts and characteristics of villainy in myriad U.S. films of the long 1980s.

Conference events included featured speaker Dr. Francesca T. Royster on “Black Country Music Futures” and a keynote address from the Julia A. Miller, president and ceo of Delmark Records, the still-active and historically essential jazz and blues label responsible for such classics as “Hoodoo Man Blues,” (Junior Wells, 1965) and “West Side Soul,” (Magic Sam, 1968).