The Graduate Program in Film and Media Studies

Inaugurated in 2002, Yale’s doctoral Program in Film and Media Studies quickly achieved the international stature it enjoys today. Building on a core faculty that had long overseen an impressive undergraduate major, the graduate program attracted incoming faculty who were eager to help shape it. The quality of the students who have applied has been superior, and the large majority of those selected have chosen to study here. Fifty students have completed, or are in the midst of, their degrees. Our alumni hold positions at a range of institutions, including universities with major graduate programs, and several have already seen their revised dissertations published as books by important presses.

Graduate students have been able to produce such significant research thanks not least to Yale’s unparalleled resources. Specialized librarians and curators keep our students in mind as they collect and make available the massive amounts of material held by the Sterling Memorial Library, the Haas library in the History of Art, and especially the Beinecke rare book library that houses the archives of hundreds of filmmakers, writers, and artists. Two of America’s great art museums, The Yale University Art Gallery and the British Art Center (with buildings designed by Louis Kahn), retain a continuing relation with our graduate students. As for primary material in our field, our neighbor in the Whitney Humanities Center, the Film Study Center, holds well over 20,000 films on video, and is now a member of FIAF (the International Federation of Film Archives) thanks to the arrival of a fulltime archivist for its growing celluloid collection. A dedicated, expert projectionist oversees hundreds of screenings each year, mainly in two spaces (the auditorium of 250 in our building and a projection room holding 40 on York Street) that are equipped for 35mm, 16mm, and virtually all video formats. 4K and 2K projections are common.

Graduate students absorb and generate the energy and enthusiasm so important to dynamic film scholarship thanks to the bustling intellectual climate at the Whitney Humanities Center, where faculty and students meet continually—almost daily it seems—around screenings, lectures, conferences and workshops, some initiated by the graduate students themselves.