In honor of Masoud Yazdani, Chairman of Intellect, who passed away in 2014, Film Matters recently commissioned its inaugural Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Film Scholarship. This tribute reflects Masoud’s keen interest in and support of Film Matters and — by extension — undergraduate scholars. This book award will now be given annually to a Film Matters author who has published a feature article during the previous volume year. The winning author receives a book from the field of film studies, in recognition of his/her achievement.
Film Matters is very pleased to report that, following a lengthy judging process (conducted by three individual academics based at institutions of higher education worldwide), the winner of the first Yazdani Award is Christina Newland, for her FM 5.1 (2014) article, “Archetypes of the Southern Gothic: The Night of the Hunter and Killer Joe.” Congratulations to Christina on her fine achievement, among what was an exceptionally high level of writing across the entire group of essays.
Christina will be receiving a copy of Valeria Belletti’s Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s, published by the University of California Press in 2006. This book will support her ongoing research for a forthcoming project.
We would also like to thank our diligent panel of judges, responsible for assessing an entire calendar year of FM articles: Michael Benton, part of the faculty of the Humanities Department at the Bluegrass Community and Technical College in Kentucky, USA; Stephen Charbonneau, Associate Professor of Film Studies and Associate Director of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, USA; and Scott Wilson, Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer at the Unitec Institute of Technology, New Zealand. Their service was instrumental to the award process.
Judging for the 2016 award (for volume 6, 2015, feature articles) will be underway soon.
