Film Matters is very pleased to announce the winner of the second annual Masoud Yazdani Award, Nace Zavrl, for his FM 6.3 (2015) article, “Spectatorship and Synchronous Sound Before the Transition: A Contextual Analysis of Chronophone, Phonofilm, and Movietone Shorts.”
Nace will be receiving a copy of Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, published by Harvard University Press in 1994.
We would also like to acknowledge and thank, once again, our wonderful panel of judges, who provided invaluable service to Film Matters and the film studies discipline, reviewing an entire volume year of FM articles on our behalf:
Frederic Leveziel is a French native with a PhD in Spanish living in Tampa, Florida. He teaches French and Spanish film, language, and culture. Leveziel is currently writing a book chapter on the Spanish and Portuguese diasporas in France, and is also working on an article on The River by Jean Renoir. He will be doing research on Renoir at the University of California, Los Angeles in August in preparation for his manuscript.
Tom Ue is the Frederick Banting Postdoctoral Fellow in the English Department at the University of Toronto and an Honorary Research Associate at University College London. He has published on Canadian cinema, Studio Ghibli, and representations of Toronto. Ue is currently at work on a book chapter about Quentin Tarantino and the western, and his long-term project is a monograph about the White Messiah. He teaches courses in film and literature at the University of Toronto.
Johnny Walker is Senior Lecturer in Media at Northumbria University in the UK, author of Contemporary British Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre and Society (Edinburgh UP, 2015) and the co-editor of the following: Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media (2016) and Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond (2016). He is the founding editor of the Global Exploitation Cinemas book series published by Bloomsbury, and is currently writing a book on the infancy of video rental culture in Britain for the University of Exeter Press.
Each year, Film Matters honors Masoud Yazdani, founding chairman of Intellect and all-around visionary who is very much missed, by recognizing an emerging undergraduate film scholar who has published a feature article in Film Matters the previous volume year. The winning author, selected by three individual academics based at institutions of higher education worldwide, receives a book from the field of film studies, in recognition of his/her achievement.
Upon the release of Film Matters issue 7.3 (2016), judging for the 2017 award will begin. All volume 7 (2016) feature article authors will automatically be considered for this distinction.
