Cathedral of Learning 501

Please join the Film and Media Studies community for a talk by USC film scholar Akira Lippit on November 30 at 3:00 p.m. in CL 501.  The title of Dr. Lippit’s talk is “Instead of Disaster: Cinema after ‘311’.”

Akira Mizuta Lippit is Vice Dean of Faculty in the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, and the T.C. Wang Family Endowed Chair in Cinematic Arts in the Division of Cinema and Media Studies.  He is also Professor of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College.  His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video, and visual studies.

Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes four books, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012); Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)(2005); Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000); and his most recent book, Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida's Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift (2016).  At present, Lippit is completing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which explores the physical and metaphysical dimensions of the "world," and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics.

His work appears widely in journals and anthologies, and has been translated into Croatian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish.  He is past recipient of the Academy of Korean Studies, Japan Foundation, and Fulbright-Hays awards.

Lippit is active in the film community as a programmer, interviewer, and jury member, and has been deeply involved in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Visual History Project.  Lippit is Senior Editor of the journal Discourse and serves on the editorial board of Film Quarterly.  He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.