Events
Fall 2020
FMS Halloween Festivities - Current and potential FMS Students welcome!
Trick or Treat
Monday, October 26 | 12:00 - 1:00 pm
Part 1 of
our FMS Halloween Festivities begins with some trick or treating! Stop by the
FMS entrance at Barnum Hall to say hello to faculty and staff -- and grab a
Halloween candy treat. Tufts physical distance protocols will be followed. Masks
required.
Details
Tuesday, October 27 | 6:00 - 7:00 pm
FMS Halloween Festivities continues with our FMS Virtual Open House. Stop by this Zoom meeting to learn about the FMS program, the major/minor, upcoming courses, internships, and more! All students who attend will be qualified to win a raffle prize!
Zoom Link (PW: Barnum) | Details
"I want to have some fun too!":
Gender, Genre, and Marriage in the Postwar Crime Sitcom
Monday, October 26
| 6:00 - 7:30 pm
Boston Cinema Media Seminar with Catherine Martin in conversation with Kathleen
Battles. In 1945, years before Lucy Ricardo became the iconic representation of
zany, rebellious housewives, married women like Pamela North, Nora Charles, and
Jean Abbott went even further in resisting their restricted postwar roles: where
Lucy acted out her domestic discontent by trying to break into the relatively
safe world of show business, Pam, Nora, and Jean successfully forced their way
out of the home and into the dangerous, decidedly masculine world of criminal
investigation. In so doing, they directly challenged their husbands' - and, by
extension, patriarchal - dominance over post-World War II systems of law, order,
and justice in American society. In this paper I argue that the radio crime
sitcom - a generic hybrid of family comedy and crime drama - became a valuable
forum through which producers and audiences explored changing ideas about
marriage and gender in the decade after WWII. Investigative wives' domestic
frustrations, expressed at the level of narrative and vocal performance, spoke
to the many women who resisted returning to the home after their wartime labors.
However, by appearing to bow to their husbands' expectations and accepting some
constraints on their freedoms, investigative wives were also able to negotiate a
space of limited freedom for themselves within the evolving, if still
conservative, institution of postwar marriage. Still, investigative wives
ultimately proved too great a challenge to the precarious postwar domestic
ideal, and they - and even, eventually, Lucy - were replaced by more compliant,
domestic housewives in the family sitcoms that came to dominate 1950s
television.
Catherine Martin is a media historian who focuses on the relationships between
representation and gender, race, and social power. Her current book project uses
representations of women in postwar US broadcast crime programming to
interrogate cultural debates over women's changing public and private roles
before the emergence of second wave feminism. She earned her PhD from Boston
University's American & New England Studies Program in January 2020.
Kathleen Battles is a Professor in the Department of Communication, Journalism
and Public Relations at Oakland University. Her research focuses on media
history, questions concerning technology and culture, and the intersections of
gender, sexuality, and media. She is the author of Calling All Cars: Radio
Dragnets and the Technology of Policing (University of Minnesota Press, 2010);
co-editor (with Joy Hayes and Wendy Hilton-Morrow) of War of the Worlds to
Social Media: Mediated Communication in Times of Crisis (Peter Lang, 2013); and
co-author (with Wendy Hilton-Morrow) of Sexual Identities and the Media: An
Introduction (Routledge, 2015).
Details
COVID-eo
Virtual Film Festival and Competition
December 3 | 6:00 – 6:00 pm
Join FMS for its first student film festival as we screen films reflecting and
responding to life in the COVID era, which creatively depict the experience of
life for Tufts students during this unique period in our history. The films will
include all forms of filmmaking, including narrative fiction, documentary,
experimental, animation, and hybrid forms--both polished productions or iPhone
footage. We are excited for our students to share their perspective with the
Tufts community through the art of the moving image! During this virtual
screening, competition winners will be announced, and prizes awarded. Films from students across all Tufts campuses will be accepted.
Details about submitting a film.