From the silent screen era to texts produced by new technologies, associate professor Janet Walker explores the history of film and its relation to society in her undergraduate lecture and seminar-style courses.

"I’m trying to teach critical thinking and critical writing skills," she explains. "That’s the most important thing: the ability to look at a text and see how the film language works and how it communicates meaning." That knowledge can then be applied not just to film, "but to television, the Internet, and any other new technologies that involve sound and image."

She hopes her students absorb not only the course context, but the historiographical concepts behind it.

"It’s probably not as important that students remember the titles of, say, Mabel Normand’s films, as that they inquire into the reasons why her name—and many of the films themselves—were lost to film history."

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