The Department of Cinematic Arts joins the many colleagues, students, friends, and family of Professor Lauren Rabinovitz in mourning her death while honoring her remarkably rich life and career. We also extend our deepest condolences to her devoted partner and soulmate Greg Easley. As a scholar, Lauren was prolific and ground-breaking; as a teacher, she was innovative and passionate, developing courses on topics ranging widely from American food culture to pornography to Disney. She chaired and served on dozens of dissertation committees, and inspired generations of students to take their pleasures seriously while never forgetting to enjoy them as well. As a member of the University and larger academic community, she gave generously of her time, wisdom, and deep investment in successful institution building and mentorship, consistently supporting the careers of others, especially junior colleagues and graduate students.

Lauren earned her PhD in American Civilization from the University of Texas-Austin and worked as an Assistant Professor of the History of Architecture and Art at the University of Illinois at Chicago before joining the Department of American Studies at the University of Iowa in 1986. She held a joint appointment in Communication Studies (where Film Studies was then located) from 1986 to 1998, and in Cinema and Comparative Literature, and the renamed Cinematic Arts, from 1998 until her retirement in 2019. She was an especially effective and highly respected Chair of American Studies from 2000 to 2008, and again from 2017 to 2018. She also served as Director of the Center for Ethnic Studies and the Arts (2006-2011), director of the Division of Interdisciplinary Programs (2005-2008), Chair of the African American Studies program (2006-2008), and Interim Chair of the Department of Women’s Studies (2007-2008). Recognition for her outstanding work as a scholar, teacher, and leader included being named a Faculty Scholar in 1996 and receiving the prestigious Regents Award for Faculty Excellence in 2010.

Lauren’s work as a scholar of film, television, and popular culture was consistently groundbreaking and influential. Her books in film studies include Points of Resistance: Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant Garde Cinema, 1943-1971 (University of Illinois Press, 1991; revised edition 2003), For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Rutgers University Press, 1998), and Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies and American Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2012), the latter bolstered by research at most of the country’s major surviving amusement parks. Amid this dedicated research, Lauren also found time to join the troupe of her colleague Rick Altman’s Living Nickelodeon, which recreated early film exhibitions for audiences at prominent venues including the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress, with Lauren playing the role of a beleaguered, wise-cracking projectionist.

Lauren also broke new ground in digital humanities scholarship with The Rebecca Project, a CD-ROM interactive book created in 1995 with her partner Greg, as well as the edited anthology Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture (Duke University Press, 2004). A pioneering scholar of television as well, she co-edited (with Susan Jeffords) Seeing Through the Media: The Persian Gulf War (Rutgers University Press, 1994) and was a founding member of the feminist collective Console-ing Passions, dedicated to the study of television, gender, and sexuality: she hosted the organization’s first conference at Iowa in 1992. Now long and fully established, at the 2024 conference many panels took place in “The Lauren Rabinovitz Room,” named to honor her crucial contribution. Her lifelong dedication to feminist media studies also generated the exciting 2003-04 Obermann Symposium on Feminism and Film History, co-directed with Kathleen Newman.

Lauren, always remarkably energetic, even when facing serious health concerns, remained vital in retirement, editing the massive, forthcoming Cambridge History of American Popular Culture and completing all but the final chapter of a book on a longstanding passion, Food in America. Characterized by abundant energy, unrelenting curiosity, and quick wit, it’s hard to believe Lauren could ever be stilled. Her brilliant work, and its demonstrable influence in several academic fields and on generations of subsequent scholars, will surely endure. For those lucky enough to cross her path personally at a conference or in a classroom or even on a descending roller coaster, warm memories of a unique thinker, mentor, and friend must inadequately serve in her unthinkable absence.