Our GS faculty member and former director Pamela Robertson Wojcik is a 2020 Guggenheim fellow!
The prestigious fellowship is awarded annually to individuals "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts."
Fellow: Awarded 2020
Field of Study: Film and Video
Competition: US & Canada
Pamela Robertson Wojcik is Professor in the Department of Film, TV and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame and Past President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Duke 1996) established her reputation within performance and star studies. In recent years, her research has been central in shaping the spatial turn in cinema and media studies. The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975 (Duke 2010) locates a philosophy of urbanism in narratives organized around apartment spaces. Fantasies of Neglect: Imagining the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (Rutgers 2016) examines the figure of the spatially mobile urban child in relation to changing ideas of the urban, childhood, and neglect. Currently, Wojcik is completing a book about Gidget as a decades-long transmedia teen girl franchise. Wojcik's Guggenheim book project, Unhomed, examines America's ambivalent and shifting attitude toward placelessness through marginalized figures of precarious mobility, including tramps, hitchhikers, the homeless, and contemporary youth. Through an examination of film cycles from the 1920s to the present, she suggests that genres of precarity have been central to American cinema all along. Photo Credit: Mark Lind