
Biography
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.
Research
Selected Research
- Latina Media Histories Feminist Media Histories Vol. 7 No. 4, Fall 2021
- Speculative Approaches to Media Histories II Feminist Media Histories Vol. 8 No. 3, Summer 2022
- A special issue on Speculative Approaches to Media Histories I Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring 2022
- Precarious Mobilities Feminist Media Histories Vol. 7 No. 3, Summer 2021
- Affect Feminist Media Histories Vol. 7 No. 2, Spring 2021
- Urgent Media and Emergent Art Feminist Media Histories Vol. 7 No. 1, Winter 2021
- Ellen C. Scott and Shelleen Greene (guest eds.) Embodiment II: Habitation Feminist Media Histories Vol. 6 No. 4, Fall 2020
- Ellen C. Scott and Shelleen Greene (guest eds.) Embodiment I: Excavations Feminist Media Histories Vol. 6 No. 3, Summer 2020
- Jennifer Peterson (guest ed.) Media and the Environment, Feminist Media Histories Vol. 6 No. 2, Spring 2020
- Carly Kocurek (guest ed.) Feminist Video Game Histories, Feminist Media Histories Vol. 6 No. 1, Winter 2020
- Jennifer M. Bean (co-editor). Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space. Indiana University Press: 2014.
- Jennifer M. Bean. Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s. Rutgers University Press: 2011.
- Jennifer M. Bean (co-editor). A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema. Duke University Press: 2002.
Research Advised
- Kristen Seifert (Co-Chair), "Brecht Between Mediums." Diss., 2019.
- Ungsan Kim. "Cruising the Cityscape: Queer Temporality in Contemporary East Asian Cinema." Diss., 2019.
- Rachel Graf. "Comics Explosion: Representations of Persecution in Graphic Narratives, 1995-2015." Diss., 2015.
- Annie Fee. "Gender, Class and Cinephilia: Parisian Cinema Cultures, 1918-1925." Diss., 2015.
- Shuli Chen. "Cinemas and Cities: Spatiality in Taiwanese, Mexican and Iranian Urban Films." Diss., 2009.
- Trevor Elkington. "Moments in Space, spaces in time: Phenomenology and the embodied depth of cinematic image." Diss., 2001.