Dr. Rashna Richards, associate professor and the T. K. Young Chair of English at Rhodes, has a new book out titled For the Love of Cinema: Teaching Our Passion In and Outside the Classroom that she co-edited with Dr. David Johnson of Salisbury University. On Feb. 6 at an event hosted by Crosstown Arts and Indie Memphis, she gave a talk about the book and what it means to teach film and media studies in the 21st century.
“For the Love of Cinema is an innovative collection that brings important new discussion to academic film scholarship on several fronts,” according to Christian Keathley, author of Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees. “This volume is not just another manual of how to teach film studies (there are plenty of those), but how to bring a certain attitude or demeanor to the practice for the purpose of stimulating student engagement and enrichment.”
The 312- page book brings together a wide range of film scholars exploring the role of love—of cinema and of cinema studies—in teaching film. Some draw on aspects of students’ love of cinema as a starting point for rethinking familiar films or generating new kinds of analyses about the medium itself, and others reflect on how their own love of cinema influences the way they teach cinema.
At Rhodes, Richards directs film and media studies, and her teaching and research interests include American film and television, critical theory, and transnational cultural studies. In 2013, she published Cinematic Flashes: Cinephilia and Classical Hollywood. Richards now is working on a monograph that investigates the intertextual relationship between the AMC TV show “Mad Men” and the movies of its era.
For the Love of Cinema is available through the Indiana University Press.