Double Crossover - Panel Discussion on Dr. Courtney M. Cox's Book

Sponsored by the John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies. Co-sponsored by the Humanities Institute, Center for Sports Communication & Media, and the Department of Radio-Television-Film

Dr. Courtney Cox, Dr. Amira Rose Davis and professional basketball player, Imani McGee-Stafford will discuss Cox's book, Double Crossover: Gender, Media, and Politics in Global Basketball and explore the increasing popularity of women's basketball alongside continued labor concerns, global politics, and a shifting media landscape. Audience Q&A to follow.

About Dr. Courtney M. Cox

Dr. Courtney M. Cox is an Associate Professor in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies (IRES) at the University of Oregon where she also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies, supporting the doctoral program and graduate certificate. She is an elected member of the Intercollegiate Athletics Advisory Committee, charged with advising the president on all policies and practices related to the academic performance and welfare of college athletes. She is affiliated with the University of Oregon Olympic Studies Hub, the Center for the Study of Women in Society, and the Women of Color Project.

She previously worked for ESPN as a Sports Emmy-nominated production assistant (event production) and stage manager (studio directing), Longhorn Network as a stage manager and associate director (studio directing), in public radio for Pasadena’s KPCC as a freelance producer, and as an intern for the WNBA's Los Angeles Sparks.

PLEASE NOTE - THIS EVENT WILL BE 4:00-5:30pm in DMC 2.106

Ladies First: Architecture, Anxiety, and Moviegoing in Urban India

Tupur Chatterjee introduces the central arguments of Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025), which locates post-globalization transformations in Indian cinema within longer histories of urban planning shaped by caste, class, and gendered anxieties. Since the late 1990s, multiplexes have been inseparable from malls, making it impossible to inhabit one space without the other. This spatial convergence has fundamentally reconfigured who counts as India's mass audience. Theatrical spaces designed for decades around the subaltern male spectator have been restructured for the consuming middle-class woman, radically altering the politics of moviegoing. She traces how this transition unfolded across media industries, architecture, popular cinema, and public culture—showing how the mall-multiplex established a new relation between media and architecture that rewrote both the gendering of cinematic space and the urban fabric of Indian cities. Rather than treating exhibition as mere distribution infrastructure, she argues that architectural mediation itself produces the ideological work of contemporary Indian screen culture.

About Tupur Chatterjee

Tupur Chatterjee is Assistant Professor of Communication and Asian Studies at Tulane University. She works at the intersection of feminist media studies, architecture and design, and global media studies. She is the author of Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025) which won the best SCMS first book award in 2026. Dr. Chatterjee has published in Television & New Media, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Porn Studies, and South Asian Popular Culture. She was previously Assistant Professor of Global Film and Media at University College Dublin.

"That sense of community is not easy to get right now”: Fandom, Community, and Platform Nostalgia

Nostalgia is often theorized as a response to disruption, offering a sense of stability and comfort in times of upheaval. In today’s disrupted media landscape, fan nostalgia is invoked to justify risk-management strategies like remaking, rebooting, and franchising proven intellectual property (IP). However, this IP-based model of fan nostalgia is an industrial assumption that obscures the conservative economic logics underpinning reboot culture. How does our understanding of fan nostalgia shift when we centre fans themselves? Laurel Rogers’ dissertation project, “Fandom Rewound: Understanding Nostalgia in Fan Identity, Community, and Practice,” argues that fan nostalgia centers not on media texts but on fandom itself.

In this presentation, Rogers draws on qualitative survey and interview data to reframe fan nostalgia around fans’ own accounts of longing for past forms of “community.” Online media fandom has been characterized by a series of platform migrations that have occurred over the last few decades. Over this time frame, social media’s trend towards more open and networked architectures has elided platform affordances that created private, intimate communal spaces for fan communities. This reconfiguration of what fandom “community” can be engenders feelings of nostalgia that challenge industrial IP-driven narratives about fan nostalgia. In particular, Rogers examines how migration from socially embedded platforms like LiveJournal to single-purpose repositories like the Archive of Our Own has transformed feedback cultures and altered the communal function of fanfiction itself. Ultimately, Rogers argues that nostalgia functions as a cultural strategy that helps fans navigate the constant disruptions of platform capitalism, offering imagined—but deeply felt—continuity amid an unstable digital landscape.

About Laurel Rogers

Laurel Rogers is a doctoral candidate in Media Studies in the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin. She received her BA in English Literature from the University of British Columbia and MA in Cinema & Media Studies from the University of Southern California. 

The First Movie Studio in Texas: Gaston Méliès’ Star Film Ranch 1910-1911 - Book Launch

Please join the Department of Radio-Television-Film to celebrate the launch of Professor Kathy Fuller-Seeley's latest book, The First Movie Studio in Texas: Gaston Méliès’ Star Film Ranch 1910-1911.

Texas-produced in films in 1910-1911 burst the confines of the first New York-centered industry. Gaston Méliès (US distributor of brother Georges’s productions) saw the decline of fantasy subjects. Gaston gambled that westerns shot in an authentic setting would attract nickel theatergoers. He thus established the Star Film Ranch studio in San Antonio, choosing cinema’s earliest cameraman “Daddy” Paley for his experience, and hiring gifted young film actors, along with a half-dozen local cowboys. The company’s 70 action-filled comedies and melodramas of southwestern ranch life won critical praise, large audiences and substantial profits.

Geography, history and climate contributed to the thriving of the Méliès Star Film Texas troupe. San Antonio was a vibrant transportation and communication center, the largest city between New Orleans and Los Angeles. Unlike Jacksonville, Florida’s backlash against the upstart film industry, the city’s business leaders welcomed Méliès. Brewer Otto Koehler promoted product placement – the troupe’s saloon sets were festooned with advertising signs for Pearl Beer.

The anonymous acting troupe included Francis Ford (who would later train younger brother John Ford), and Edith Storey (who also played young boys); she was the darling of critics with her subtle acting and vivacious personality. In the films’ plots, (all filmed out of doors) plucky young women dashed madly across the prairies, rival suitors turned murderous, and English fops got their comeuppance from cowhands.

Production challenges abounded. The Patents Trust limited Méliès to one 1000-foot reel release per week. The troupe had to work at breakneck speed to meet Méliès demands for two finished films each week. Exposed film initially had to be shipped to New York before returning or editing. In 1911, however, Méliès brought developing and printing equipment to the Ranch. City leaders rejected filming of their ambitious drama The Immortal Alamo at the old mission, so it had to be recreated at the ranch. A dozen actors, with the aid of changing mustaches and hats, took four separate roles apiece.

Fast-changing industry conditions pushed Méliès to relocate to California in Fall 1911. His Trust-controlled films were soon eclipsed, however, by independent studios producing two-and-three reel, narratively complex features. In its moment, however, the Méliès Star Film’s Texas success contributed to the long-term development of the American film industry.

About Kathy Fuller-Seeley

Professor Kathy Fuller-Seeley’s research specialization focuses on American film, radio and television history and audience reception studies.

Fuller-Seeley is co-producer of Francis Ford, The Craving, plus Three Shorts, Blu-ray/DVD of restored rare silent films 1911-1919 created by the mysterious older brother of director John Ford. The disk includes her documentary, Francis Ford, Film Pioneer, (Undercrank Productions, 2024)

Fuller-Seeley teaches undergraduate courses on the historical development of film and media industries; gender and media in the 1960s; the study of contemporary comedy; silent film; Classical Hollywood stars and fans; and graduate courses in media historiography and media reception studies. She’s delighted to have received a “Texas Ten” teaching award in 2024 from the Texas Exes and The Alcalde magazine.