Up to ten fellows to be selected, $2500 stipends, plus up to $500 (or $1,000 for overseas travel) to help defray travel/housing expenses of visiting scholars.

Application Deadline: February 2, 2004 - Seminar Dates: June 2-15, 2004

Click here to download Application Guidelines (PDF)

Popular representations of the law in cinema and the legal decisions and institutions that regulate such representations off-screen are crucial to how the public understands and experiences the legal system. In this interdisciplinary seminar, scholars are invited to explore and write about the intersections of cinema, law and the state through a comparative perspective, with particular attention to Asia, where both cinema and law have changed dramatically in recent decades. How, we will ask together, do the state and law impact film and popular culture in national, diasporic, and global contexts? How do legal fictions function as metaphors for larger historical, ethical, national, or international matters? How do citizenship and spectatorship intersect in specific film industries and on movie screens?

Some themes to be addressed—within and especially across national boundaries—may include: the fictional representation of legal systems and trials, and the dramatic characterization of lawyers, judges, and criminals in popular films; historical and ongoing state regulation and censorship of cinema, and the increased space for negotiation between filmmakers and their regulators; adaptations of law and regulation away from religious and colonial models toward secular and national concerns; film financing and distribution; and historical and persistent patterns of tension between creativity and control, innovation and tradition, or resistance and regulation that mark specific national cinemas as well as films with international circulation and audiences. These issues are all at work in Asia and in Asian communities around the world, and we will have a particular interest in those contexts.

The seminar invites applications from scholars in as wide an array of fields as possible, including but not limited to film and media studies, law and legal studies, Asian studies, women’s studies, political theory, econo-mics, religious studies, communications, journalism, sociology and other fields.

Successful applicants will be expected to develop a first draft of an essay by the start of the seminar.  Participants will read and discuss each of the draft essays along with common readings and will attend special presentations by notable speakers. Participants will revise their essays during and immediately following the seminar for inclusion in an edited volume.

Directors: Mark Sidel, Associate Professor of Law, and Corey K. Creekmur, Associate Professor of English and Cinema & Comparative Literature and Director, Institute for Cinema and Culture, The University of Iowa.

Services: Offices, personal computers, Internet access, library service, technical support, copying, meeting rooms.

Funded by the C. Esco and Avalon L. Obermann Fund and by the Office of the Vice President for Research at The University of Iowa

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