Pitt Film Studies Professor Named President of Society for Cinema Studies

October 4, 2001

PITTSBURGH––Lucy Fischer, professor of English and film studies and director of the Film Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh, has been named president of the international Society for Cinema Studies. Her term extends to June 2003.

Fischer, who has spent much of her career exploring the role of women in film, is currently writing a book, Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema, and the Female Form, to be published in 2002 by Columbia University Press. Her other books include Jacques Tati (1983), Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema (1989), Imitation of Life (1991), Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre (1996), and Sunrise (1998).

Articles she has written on issues of film history, theory, and criticism have been published in such journals as Screen, Sight and Sound, Camera Obscura, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, Women and Performance, Frauen und Film, and Film Quarterly.

Fischer has held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. She also has written catalog essays for exhibitions at the Wight Gallery in Los Angeles and the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y. Her honors include an Art Critics Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Founded in 1959, the Society for Cinema Studies is a professional organization composed of college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others concerned with the study of the moving image. The society is the major academic film organization in the country. Although primarily American, it draws members from throughout the world.

As president, Fischer will play a large role nationally, assuming responsibility, among other things, for staging the society's annual conference, which will be held next May in Denver, Colo.

The society strives to promote all areas of media studies within universities and two- and four-year colleges; encourage and reward excellence in scholarship and writing; facilitate and improve the teaching of media studies as disciplines; advance multi-cultural awareness and interaction; serve its members' professional needs and concerns; strengthen the ties between the academic community and those who interact with it, from the media industry to the government to the public at large; and promote the preservation of our film, television, and video heritage.

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