Janna Jones, PhD

Research and teaching interests

 

My scholarly research is centered at the intersection of cultural studies and film studies. My primary research interest is making sense of and interpreting the ways that contemporary culture constructs the cinematic past.  My three current areas of investigation  are the study of the film archive b) the study of amateur and home movies c) the study of cinema going (the sociability, rituals and habits of film watching). My teaching interests focus upon helping my students reshape and reconsider many of their long-standing assumptions about their media worlds. I aim to help my students interrogate their media environments by stressing critical, innovative, diverse and global perspectives.

I am also a screenwriter and currently have multiple screenplays in development or in preproduction. I also produce award winning student screenplays. You can watch a few of them here:
In Tandem (2014) https://vimeo.com/94925438
Schwarz Weiss (2015) https://vimeo.com/127952050   The Mutable Life of Oscar Clark (2013) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNFU71IcFXE
[http://img.youtube.com/vi/gNFU71IcFXE/0.jpg]<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNFU71IcFXE>

The Mutable Life of Oscar Clark – YouTube<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNFU71IcFXE>
www.youtube.com

Courses offered

 

Undergraduate:

Introduction to Screenwriting

Intermediate Screenwriting

Independent Film production capstone

Cinema Storytelling

Graduate:

Critical Television Studies
History of Documentary Film

Representative research and creative activity

• “Starring Sally Peshlakai: Rewriting the Script for Tad Nichols’s 1939 Navajo Rug Weaving,” (Amateur
  Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, 2014)
• The Past is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film (University Press of Florida, 2012)
• “The VHS Generation and their Movie Experiences,” Watching Films: New Perspectives on Movie-Going, Exhibition and Reception, eds. Karina Aveyard and Albert Moran (Intellect Books, 2012)
• “When the Movie Started, We All Got Along: Generation X Remembers Movie Night,” Media International Australia, no. 139, May 2011, pp. 96-102.
• The Southern Movie Palace : Rise, Fall, and Resurrection , (University Press of Florida, 2003)

Links of interest

The Library of Congress American Memory<http://memory.loc.gov/>
Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music & Way Back Machine<http://www.archive.org/>

Education:

PhD, Communication, University of South Florida, 1998