introduction
Officially established in 2000, Wellesley’s Cinema and Media Studies department has since flourished as one of the college’s most exciting and popular majors. But the creation of the department and of the major was not easy – it took years and years of concentrated effort, experimentation, setbacks, and interdepartmental collaboration. Our project seeks to explore the pivotal events and people that helped shape the curriculum as we know it today, as well as look at how the program has responded to the evolution of film and media in the last twenty years.
“In the course of discussions spanning the past five years, it became clear that what Wellesley really needs is a broader program that somehow regionalizes, without dismissing it, film’s role as an art form by incorporating it into the larger spectrum of Media Studies.” – Professor Viano, 1998
Selected dates in the history of the program (1970-2010)
1970 – 1971: Robert Garis, a professor in the English department, creates and teaches a course titled “Interpretation and Judgment of Films” as an extradepartmental offering. This is the first course taught at Wellesley that explicitly studies film.
1990s: By the mid to late 1990s, multiple students have created their own individual majors to study film.
1993: A group of faculty on the Film and Video advisory committee propose a minor in Film Studies. The proposal did not succeed on the grounds that “several faculty felt a certain epistemological unease at the idea of a film program divorced from the wider context in which cinema grew historically and exists today.”
1998: Another proposal, pioneered by Italian Studies professor Maurizio Viano, is prepared for the creation of a comprehensive Film and Media Studies Program at Wellesley. Viano states that “It became clear that what Wellesley really needs is a broader program that somehow regionalizes, without dismissing it, film’s role as an art form by incorporating it into the larger spectrum of Media Studies.” Viano also notes that the creation of a Film Studies program would “institutionalize a series of thus far scattered efforts, putting Wellesley’s curriculum back on the same level as comparable institutions which all acknowledge the centrality of media in today’s society.”
2000s: By the early 2000s, multiple departments at Wellesley, just as sociology, political science, art, and WGST, had implemented courses dedicated to the study of the moving image.
2000: The Cinema and Media Studies department is officially established after years of effort. The department is fully operational for the 2000-01 academic year.
2002: The first CAMS majors graduate from Wellesley.
2006: The department drops the social science requirement after the Sociology department determines it will no longer teach courses on popular culture and media. The major was then reconfigured to include a course in the Art department and a course in “creative disciplines” associated with the moving image like photography, screenwriting, or video production.
2006-07: A 3-person advisory board is created that consists of Maurizio Viano, Vernon Shetley of the English department, and Eve Zimmerman of the East Asian Languages and Literature department. The board was made to steer the program, since all decisions up until this point were exclusively being made by Shetley or Viano, and one or the other was always the director.
2008-09: Laura Mulvey is the Cornille Visiting Professor at the Newhouse Center for the Humanities; she contributes to the CAMS program a course titled “Women and Cinema.”
Courses offered
Born out of extra-departmental film courses, and film courses from various language departments, the course offerings under the umbrella of cinema and media studies have changed throughout the past several decades. Beginning with the course “Interpretation and Judgment of Films” (extra-departmental 231) in 1971, focusing on works from Goddard, Bergman, Antonini, and more was the first-ever course offered that explicitly concentrated on film studies. This course eventually evolved to become CAMS 231 “Film as Art” upon the establishment of the CAMS major. By the year 2000, courses focusing on film in the various language departments, Women and Gender Studies, Political Science, Anthropology, Sociology, and other majors emerged.
In a collective effort by Professor Vernon Shetley of the English department, Professor Viano of Italian, and Professor Tom Cushman of Sociology in the 2000-2001 academic year the Cinema and Media Studies major was established. Initially, the CAMS department consisted of only a handful of its own courses in combination with several interdepartmental courses. Some interdepartmental courses included courses such as the Political Science department’s “Media in American Democracy”, the English department’s “American Cinema”, and the Artistry department’s “Women Filmmakers”.
When the major launched in 2000 few courses were actually added to the course catalog. Despite the creation of a brand new major, the department established only a new introductory level course and one upper 300-level course — the rest of the major relied on preexisting interdepartmental courses.
