Ivory-Sinclair: How did you first hear about Film Matters and how did you decide to get involved?
Tim Palmer: Along with Liza Palmer, I co-founded the journal and oversaw its origins. The idea and concept were hers, I should stress.
IS: How do you mentor your students?
TP: Mentoring to me is the most catalytic yet overlooked part of the job of academia. It’s essential to the craft of the academic, and is something – in my experience – all good teachers and professors enjoy, investing much of their working time into. I work with students preparing their papers for submission for Film Matters, as well as supervising Honors Students – my Honors supervisee, Levi Vasquez, just had his paper chosen by the UNCW [University of North Carolina Wilmington] as its single nominee for the Best Honors Paper, to be considered for the annual Portz Scholar award, offered by the National Collegiate Honors Council, which made me very happy. To me it’s about introducing students to the professional elements of research, peer review, and publication; all of which are essential to know, and know well, if you want to get into this career track. Intellectually, I try always to expose my students to ideas, texts, films and materials inside and outside the classroom, to get as much out of their time in college as possible. Mentoring, in other words, extends in many directions outwards from all the facets of my work as a film professor.
IS: What does your students getting published in Film Matters mean to you?
TP: It means they’re getting to participate in a process that I find exciting and galvanizing: joining a conversation, going onto the permanent record, having their words and ideas become part of our emerging body of knowledge. Publishing is sometimes an arduous business – it takes a lot of time and commitment to get from brainwaves to printed words. But seeing it happen, as well as hearing back from other students who’ve appeared in Film Matters, shows me that they get how exciting it all is. If nothing else, being published in Film Matters can be vital as part of an application to leading graduate programs. It shows you take academia seriously, and want to join in. I’ll regularly now assign essays from Film Matters for my Introduction to World Cinema class, which just underlines the contribution such students, emerging scholars, can make.
IS: How does your students getting published in Film Matters help your department?
TP: It shows that we’re more than just about film production, which can often be an issue at the UNCW. Publishing is actually a growing employment opportunity for our majors here – a number of our recent grads now make it their career. Film Matters showcases a lot of the activities centered around the critical study of cinema, the active historical component we’re into in this department. Our students’ work appearing in print is a great tribute to the work that’s being done in (and beyond) our critical studies classrooms every semester.
Author Biography
Ivory-Sinclair is a Film Studies major at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.
