Susan Courtney

Associate Professor of English and Film Studies
Office: 508 Humanities Office Building
(803) 777-2361
courtney@sc.edu

Education

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1997

Specialization Areas

• American cinema
• film and media theory
• film genre
• gender studies
• critical race studies

Recent Courses

See Course Descriptions for detailed information.

• Introduction to Film Studies
• Film (and Media) Theory
• The “South” on Film
• Film Genre: The Musical
  
  

Research

Courtney, who directs the Film Studies Program, recently published Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967 (Princeton University Press, 2005).  She is currently working on a new book with the tentative title, Regional Projections: Imagining the South, the West, and the U.S.A. at the Movies.  This project juxtaposes two exceptionally mythic locations in film culture to consider how cinema has helped shape our conceptions not only of regional identity, but also of a larger, imagined “America” comprised of such filmic parts.  Of particular interest are the ways film can participate in forms of cultural and psychological projection, whereby widespread national histories, traumas, and anxieties can be represented and denied, located and relocated, remembered and forgotten through film mythologies of place.