Ger Zielinski

Dr. Ger Zielinski lectures on cultural studies, film and new media. He wrote his dissertation in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, where he participated in the following two international research groups: Culture of Cities Project (SSHRC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative) and Centre de recherche sur l'intermédialité (Université de Montréal). Recently, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University (2008-2010) as well as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University and guest researcher at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. He was recently a visiting scholar researching and writing as a guest at the Cinema Studies Institute, Innis College, at the University of Toronto.

Primary areas of research include LGBT and queer cinemas, cultural geography, culture of film exhibition and festivals, film institutions, post-1968 German cinema, and new media aesthetics and theory, and the relation between film/media and urban cultures. He co-founded the Film and Media Festivals Scholarly Interest Group (2011-) in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).

Zielinski has four main writing projects underway.

(1) The first project “Festivality and the Production of Community: On Social Movements and Their Media Practices” is a book that stems from his dissertation project and concerns the emergence of community film festivals alongside associated social movements (particularly civil rights, aboriginal rights, women's, and lesbian and gay) during the 1970s and 80s.

(2) He received a grant from the Symons Trust Fund for the Study of Canada for his project “From Scene to Seen: Cinematic Cities in Canada” is a book centred on the question of Canadian cinematic cities in its full ambivalence, viz. selected cities and their representation in film and other media, sexual geography, urban identity in tension with regional and national identities, funding policies, runaway productions.

(3) The third publication, “Screens and Scenes in the Shifting (West-) Berlin Undergrounds, 1970s and 80s,” is a book that addresses the traveling transnational notion of “underground” (cinema) and its associated scenes in West Berlin in the 1970s, in relation to the earlier New York City Underground scenes, the infamous Knokke festivals, Cologne's radical art scenes, among others.

(4) The fourth project "On the Digital Transformation of Film Exhibition and Festivals" concerns the radical changes in exhibition and screen cultures, alongside the emergence of the new media technologies.

He has taught extensively – history of communication, national cinema, and sexual diversity studies (founded Sprinkle: Undergraduate Journal of Sexual Diversity Studies) at McGill University, critical media studies at Concordia University (Montreal), as well as film and new media theory at Ryerson University in Toronto – and has recently given guest lectures at Columbia University, New York University and McGill University.

Zielinski was awarded the Beaverbrook Dissertation Completion Fellowship, and is recipient of the FQRSC (Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture) Doctoral Research Fellowship, SSHRC-McGill (Social Science and Humanities Research Council) Research Grant, DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) Fellowship, several Canada Council for the Arts Grants, TD Bank Group-CCA Collection Research Grant at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA, Montreal), Power Corporation Fellowship, and a Kluge Collection research grant from Princeton University, among others.

For several years he served as a film programmer and member of the nomadic experimental film and video exhibition group Pleasure Dome ( http://pdome.org ). He also continues to work as an editor for Alphabet City ( http://alphabet-city.org/ ) (MIT Press), and as a critic he writes for a handful of art and film magazines.
Address: School of Professional Communication
Ryerson University
350 Victoria Street
Toronto, ON M5B 2K3
Canada