Office hours

• Thursdays 9:30 - 11 a.m. and  3:30 - 5 p.m.
• Zoom link:
  https://uiowa.zoom.us/j/93080360515?pwd=RXRnWmFLcFNQc0FQR0l2ck0zQk4rZz09#success

Get to know Paula

Paula Amad is an Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Cinematic Arts, where she served as Chair of Department from 2016-2020.  She teaches and researches at the intersection of film history and film theory, with specialization in French cinema, nonfiction film, archive and memory studies, feminist film history, postcolonial theory and visual studies, and the relationship between photography and film.

She is the author of Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday and Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète (Columbia University Press, 2010), which was deemed a highly recommended book by the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Awards (2011), and numerous articles in journals such as Feminist Media Histories, Modernism/Modernity, Representations, Camera Obscura, History of Photography, Cinema Journal, Film History, and Framework. She is currently completing a second book focused on the airplane and camera as the twin vision and dream machines of early twentieth-century modernity.

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