Those Who Serve: Contact Info & Bionotes

Cortland Rankin

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contact: rankicw@bgsu.edu

Cortland Rankin is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Theatre and Film at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Ohio. His primary research interests include the relationship between war cinema and American cultural memory and cinematic representations of postwar American urbanism. His most recent research centers on the cinema and television of the Korean War. He is the author of two chapters on Korean War and Iraq War films as war memorials in Hollywood Remembrance and American War (Routledge, 2020) edited by Andrew Rayment and Paul Nadasdy and his article “Forgettable Films of the Forgotten War: American Cinema and the Erasure of the Korean War” is currently under review at Film History: An International Journal. In the field of cinematic urbanism, he has published an article entitled “Painting the Town Green: From Urban Teleology to Urban Ecology in New York Cinema, 1960-Present” co-authored with Brady Fletcher in NECSUS, European Journal of Media Studies (Spring 2013) and his forthcoming book Decline and Reimagination in Cinematic New York (Routledge) explores cinematic representations of New York urbanism across mainstream, independent, documentary, and experimental films from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s.

 

Nathan Blake

Contact: n.blake@northeastern.edu

Nathan Blake is a Teaching Professor in Media and Screen Studies at Northeastern University. He has written on motion-capture recording and prosthetic limbs for veterans in Discourse, and is revising a manuscript on the photography and visual systems of World War I. He has taught a number of courses on War and Media as well as Apocalyptic Film and Media. Beginning with a 2020 SCMS presentation on the HBO series Chernobyl, he is currently exploring the relationships between war and the Anthropocene in terms of: 1. the environmental devastation and health effects of war—including the use, production, and disposal of nuclear and chemical weapons; and 2. diminishing extractive resources, the steady rise of climate refugees, and the geopolitical compromises and tensions such crises engender.

 

Contact: mberwald@usc.edu

Max Berwald is a PhD student in cinema and media studies at the University of Southern California. His research focuses on media and the US-China relationship, with a special interest in how media in both countries contribute to the increasing militarization of the relationship. His dissertation reconsiders militarism in light of shifting dynamics between state media, corporate media, and user-generated content. Forthcoming work in the International Journal of Communications considers the role discourses of socio-technical error played in media coverage of the 1999 NATO bombing of the PRC’s Belgrade embassy, both in the US and PRC. Past work has considered the relationship between state and independent documentary film culture in the PRC. He is also interested in the role played by emergent military media forms in environmental discourses and in resource extraction. Berwald has lived, worked and studied in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei.

 

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We’d like to thank all current and former co-chairs and grad student representatives for their service on behalf of the SIG:

Co-Chairs (3-year terms, renewable)

  • Nathan Blake (2022-2025)
  • Cortland W. Rankin (2022-2025)
  • Anna Froula (2020-2023; ended term early in 2022)
  • Karen A. Ritzenhoff (2019-2022)
  • Stacy Takacs (2015-2020)
  • Rebecca Harrison (2016-2019)
  • Karen Randell (2015-2016)

Graduate Student Representatives (2-year terms, non-renewable)

  • Max Berwald (2024–2026)
  • Vivienne Tailor (2022-2024)
  • Andrew O. McLaughlin (2020-2022)
  • Magdalena Yüksel (2018-2020)
  • Daniel Grindberg (2017-2018)
  • Eileen Rositzka (2015-2017)