Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

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Cover of Foster's newest book, Class Passing.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is a professor in the Department of English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, specializing in film studies, cultural studies, and Postfeminist Critical Theory. Her newest book is A Short History of Film, published in 2008, from Rutgers University Press, co-written with Wheeler Winston Dixon.

Her most recent books include

• Class-Passing: Social Mobility in Film and Popular Culture, (Southern Illinois University Press, 2005);
• Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions (State University of New York Press, 2003);
• Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003);
• Experimental Cinema: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2002);
• Troping the Body: Etiquette, Conduct and Dialogic Performance (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and
• Captive Bodies: Postcolonialism in the Cinema (State University of New York Press, 1999).

Foster's recent book, Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions, was cited by the journal Choice as “Essential . . . one of the Outstanding Academic Books of the Year” for 2004.

Since 1999, with Wheeler Winston Dixon, Foster has been the Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video. QRFV is an interdisciplinary and internationally recognized academic journal of visual studies, film studies and cultural studies. Published by Routledge, QRFV publishes essays and reviews of considerable significance to the fields of Film Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. QRFV indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, International Index to Film Periodicals, Film and Literature Index, Post Script, Media Review Digest and Film and Literature Review.

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Cover of Foster's book Performing Whiteness.

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster's other credits include articles published in Text and Performance Quarterly, The Friend: Comment on Romanticism, Film Criticism and Prairie Schooner, as well as the production, direction and screenplay for "Women Who Made the Movies" (1992), a documentary on the history of women filmmakers from 1896-1960, distributed by Women Make Movies.

"Women Who Made the Movies" is in the permanent collections of Barnard College, George Mason University, The University of Washington, and New York University, and numerous other institutions, and has been screened at the National Women's Studies Association 15th Annual Conference, Ames, Iowa, June 18, 1994 (with a lecture); The Films de Femmes Festival, Créteil, France, Spring, 1994; The Women in Film 9th International Film Festival, Universal City, California, March 5, 1994; and the Dallas Video Festival, November 13, 1993 (with a lecture on the making of the film).

Recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation Grant for Performance Art, Gwendolyn Foster also served as a judge for final selections of The Southwest Alternate Media Project Independent Production Fellowship Funds of the National Endowment for the Arts, July 29-31, 1993, in Houston, TX, and was a Juror for 16th Annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Student Film Awards.

In the summer of 1994, Foster wrote the screenplay for the French-language feature film "Squatters" which was produced outside of Paris in June, 1994, for French television. In the Winter of 1997, Dr. Foster delivered a lecture at The Museum of Modern Art in New York on the films of Barbara Hammer, in conjunction with a screening of Hammer’s work, and presented a paper on the work of filmmaker Safi Faye at the 1997 MLA National Convention in Washington, DC.

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Cover of Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Foster’s recent articles and essays include “Barbara Hammer,” in Film Voices: Interviews from Post Script, Gerald Duchovnay, ed., State University of New York Press, 2004; “Monstrosity and the Bad-White Body Film,” in Bad: Infamy, Darkness, Evil and Slime on Screen, Murray Pomerance, ed. State University of New York Press, 2004; “Every Frame Was Precious,” Film Criticism 18.1 (Fall, 2003); “Women Filmmakers in British Sound Cinema,” in The Encyclopedia of British Film, Brian McFarlane, ed., London: Methuen Press /British Film Institute, 2003; “The Post-Colonial Vision of The “Great White” of Lambaréné,” Popular Culture Review, 11. 2 (Summer 2000); ‘“Character Zone: An Interview with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Countervisions: Asian American Film Criticism, Sandra Liu and Darrell Y. Hamamoto, eds., Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000; “Feminist Theory and the Performance of Lesbian Desire in Persona,” in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Lloyd Michaels, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000; “Diasporic Representations of Identity and Space in the films of Mira Nair,” Deep Focus: A Film Quarterly 7. 3/4 (1999): ‘“Character Zone,” Cinema-Intervals, Trinh T. Minh-ha, ed., New York: Routledge Press (1999); 227 – 245; “The Women in High Noon: The Metanarrative of Difference,” in The Films of Fred Zinnemann, Arthur Nolletti, ed., State University of New York Press, 1999; “Foreword: Women Filmmakers.” Women on the Other Side of the Camera: The St. James Women Filmmakers Encyclopedia. Farmington Hills, MI: Visible Ink Press, 1999: “Performativity and Gender in Alice Guy’s La Vie du Christ,” Film Criticism 23.1 (Fall, 1998), and “Safi Faye: Ethnographic Films and Questions of Subjectivity,” Popular Culture Review 9. 2 (August 1998).

Dr. Foster’s awards and fellowships include a College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Teaching Award, January, 2004; a Grant-In-Aid Fellowship from the John C. and Nettie V. David Memorial Trust, Fall 2003; $6,500; a Research Fellowship from the University of Nebraska Research Council, for the project “The Films of Alice Guy Blaché,” involving travel to film archives in New Zealand and Amsterdam to view rare film prints of the films of Alice Guy Blaché, 1999; and the prestigious National Emerging Scholar Award, American Association of University Women, 1998, for teaching, research, and the mentoring of women students.

Foster's interests extend far beyond the limits of conventional film studies; she explores in her most recent writings the intersections between popular culture, the culture of celebrity, television and gender lifestyles, and has just completed a new book, co-written with Wheeler Winston Dixon, entitled "A Short History of Film", from Rutgers University Press, published in 2008.

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• Official Quarterly Review of Film and Video Homepage