February 17, 2006

Cinema and Media Studies: Snapshot of an 'Emerging' Discipline

By KRIN GABBARD

Although cinema and media studies have been a prominent part of American academe since the 1960s and at a handful of universities since the 1910s, only now are they on the verge of being officially recognized as the components of a real discipline.

Every dozen years or so, the National Research Council attempts to determine which universities have the strongest departments of philosophy, physics, economics, and other familiar disciplines. Film and media studies, however, have never