Session 3: Critical Thinking NOTE: DATE CHANGE

Oct 15 2020
-
Oct 16 2020
When: 5:00 PM - 4:59 PM
Where: ONLINE (Zoom)
Event Type: Polymathic Pizza

Event Details

Critical thinking is a polymathic value employed by ancient philosophers to present day scholars to understand who we are and why we are who we are.  It is methodological and epistemological, as students become self-conscious about the processes by which they address problems in their fields and how other fields may go about considering similar problems.  Join Professor Laura Serna as she guides us through her cinematic and historical frameworks toward critical self-awareness and more clarity of the world around us.

 

PLEASE NOTE DATE CHANGE: Thursday, October 15 5p to 6:30p | ESVP CODE PIZZA1008 remains the same

 

Speaker Information

Speaker

Laura Serna

Associate Professor of History and Cinema and Media Studies

Laura Isabel Serna is an Assistant Professor of Critical Studies at USC. She is the author of Making Cinelandia: American Films and Mexican Film Culture before the Golden Age. She has published essays on Mexican film culture during the silent era in Aztlán and The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural. She has also published essays on Latino Stardom and the commercial practices that enabled early Hollywood to reach global audiences. Trained as a cultural historian, her primary research interests are the cultural history of cinema during the silent period (especially historical reception studies), Chicana/o and Latina/o media and culture, Silent Cinema in Mexico, and nationalism and the formation of film cultures. Her current project, “The Photoplay Made Mexican” examines early Hollywood’s techniques for producing Mexico and Mexicans on screen in an attempt to theorize cinematic brownface. She teaches courses on international silent cinema, Latina/o Media, Mexican cinema, and Film History. She received a PhD from Harvard University, BA from UC Berkeley, and numerous fellowships including an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Fulbright-García Robles Fellowship in support of her research.