Jennifer M. Bean (she/her)

Jennifer M. Bean is Robert Jolin Osborne Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Adjunct Associate Professor of Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, and Editor-in-Chief of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal.  She has published widely on silent-era cinema, including her edited and co-edited collections such as the award-winning Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana UP, 2014), Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (Rutgers UP, 2011), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke UP, 2002) and a special issue of Camera Obscura on “Early Women Stars” (2001).  She is a past recipient of the prestigious Katherine Singer Kovacs essay award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, as well as the Best Edited Collection in English Language Film and Media Studies, and most recently was named a 2023-24 fellow by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).  Her investment in silent-era film preservation agendas has led to her advisory work for the Women Film Pioneers Project, Thanhouser Film Company Preservation, Inc., Turner Classic Movies, the British Film Institute, BBC-2, and the National Film Preservation Foundation.  Her voice-overs on various restored films from the early period of cinema can be heard on three DVD-anthologies, More Treasures from The Film Archives (2004), Treasures III: Social Issues in Early American Cinema (2007), and Cinema's First Nasty Women (2022).  At the University of Washington, she teaches courses in feminist and queer theory, video essay production, global film genres, American film cultures, eco-criticism, film archives, and media historiography.