Film Matters is pleased to announce that Michael Benton, Humanities Professor at Bluegrass Community & Technical College (BCTC) in Lexington, KY, has agreed to serve as our inaugural Community College Editor. Starting with issue 12.1 (2021), Film Matters will regularly feature the film and media studies writing/analytical work of community college students in the United States and beyond. Recognizing that the undergraduate experience in the US is more often starting at community college, and celebrating the vital role community colleges play in higher education access, Film Matters is excited to outreach to this important academic audience.
Michael Benton grew up in San Diego and left to go to college in the Midwest (degrees in Accounting, English/History and Cultural Studies) before settling in the borderline South. He has been living and working in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky since 2002. At BCTC he teaches courses on Film Studies, World Cinema, Peace & Conflict Studies, and Writing/Rhetoric. Since he is often overwhelmed by the sheer volume of materials necessary to even stay barely conversant with these subjects, he archives resources at his website Dialogic Cinephilia (http://internationalfilmstudies.blogspot.com/) for his teaching and for anyone else it would help make sense of the world. He has also been running the Bluegrass Film Society for fifteen years. Here are some of the past schedules: http://internationalfilmstudies.blogspot.com/2013/08/bluegrass-film-society-schedules.html.
If you are a community college educator and would like to get your students involved with Film Matters, Michael wants to work with you! And if you are a community college student looking for publication experience, Michael wants to hear from you! He can be reached at michael.benton AT kctcs.edu (please put Film Matters in the subject line).
