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Catherine L. Benamou
University of California Irvine

Associate Professor, Film & Media Studies School of Humanities
Affiliated Faculty, Women's Studies School of Humanities
Affiliated Faculty, Chicano/Latino Studies School of Social Sciences
Affiliated Faculty, Latin American Studies School of Humanities   Ph.D., New York University, 1997, Cinema Studies  

My research is mostly hemispheric in scope, and it is generally concerned with the politics and aesthetics of inter-American representation, as well as the formation of migrant subjectivity and spaces for expression with respect to national and globalizing media industries, circuits, and practices. I am currently at work on a multi-site, multi-phase study of the reciprocal impact of the transnational transmission of television on diasporic Latina/o communities in four cities entitled "The Electronic Embrace/El Abrazo Electrónico." The main focus is on urban mediascapes, and processes of viewer enfranchisement and transculturation, along with the blurring of boundaries between news reports and fictional narratives, the navigation of linguistic divides, and the negotiation and transformation of gendered, national, and ethnic identities by way of surrogate representations in a rapidly changing political and social context. My published work to date has focused on the historical and textual retrieval and reconstruction of a film project undertaken by Orson Welles during the "Good Neighbor" policy era, documentary cinema, competing claims placed on latinidad in the U.S. media, and the cultura and political stakes linked to the representation of gender, class, and national identity in Brazilian, Cuban, and Mexican cinema, with an emphasis on the late 20th century.