Office Hours

• Tuesday 11:30am-2:30pm

Get to know Paula

Paula Amad is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa, where she served as Department Chair from 2016 to 2020. She is the recipient of the University of Iowa’s Hubbard-Walder Award for Excellence in Teaching, and her research has received numerous distinctions, including an invitation to deliver the Martin Walsh Memorial Lecture at the annual conference of the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada and the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Katherine Singer Kovács Outstanding Essay Award. Her research has also been supported by the J. Paul Getty Foundation and the Shpilman Institute for Photography and she has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.

Amad’s teaching and research span film history and theory, with specializations in French cinema, nonfiction film, archival and memory studies, feminist film history, postcolonial theory and visual studies, and the histories and theories of photography and cinema. Her work explores the intersections of film, photography, archives, and visual culture, bringing historical and theoretical perspectives to bear on the ways moving and still images shape modernity, memory, and visual experience.

She is the author of Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday and Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (Columbia University Press, 2010), which was designated a highly recommended book by the 2011 Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Awards. Her essays have appeared in leading journals, including Feminist Media Histories, Modernism/Modernity, Representations, Camera Obscura, History of Photography, Cinema Journal, Film History, and Framework. Her forthcoming book, Aerial Sublime: Photography, Cinema, and Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2027), examines the airplane and the camera as twin vision machines of modernity, exploring how aerial perspectives and cinematic movement transformed modern visual culture and the experience of seeing between the poles of wonder and terror.

Courses taught 

Recent graduate courses include: Success in Graduate Studies; Digital Dust: Archives and New Media, Aerial Vision, From Document to Documentary, Cinema and the Everyday, Colonial/Postcolonial Theory & Cinema; and undergraduate courses on Moviegoing Histories, Paris on Film, History of Documentary, Photography and Film, European Silent Cinema, Recording War, and Consumer Culture and Cinema.

Selected publications

• “Affective Cin-aereality: Women and Aviation in Silent Cinema.” Feminist Media Histories 7.2 (Spring 2021): 145-187.

Research interests

• French cinema

• Nonfiction film

• Archive and memory studies

• Postcolonial theory in the visual domain

• The relationship between photography and film