Congratulations to graduate student Patrick Zambianchi for receiving the 2012 Alvord Fellowship in the Humanities!

Thursday, April 26, 2012
4:30pm
Communications 120

Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen introduces Branding Illness, a documentary film he made with Anne Georget. Branding Illness explores the various strategies used by pharmaceutical companies to turn us all into patients and drug consumers. Whereas in the past the pharmaceutical industry was creating new drugs to cure diseases, the film explores how it now promotes new diseases to better sell drugs.

Congratulations to Nathaniel Greeberg for receiving the 2012 Arts and Sciences Dean’s Medal (HUMANITIES) – Graduate Timeless Award!

The documentary made by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen with Anne Georget (“Maladies à vendre”/”Branding Illness”) received the second prize in the “Health and Prevention” Category at the 2012 Festival International du Film de Santé (International Health Film Festival) held in Liège, Belgium.  Congratulations Mikkel!

Yomi Braester is the recipient of the 2012 Joseph Levenson Book Prize, in the post-1900 Category, given by the China and Inner Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, for his new book Painting the City Red.

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Yomi Braester
Painting the Ciity Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract
Duke University Press, 2010

Painting the City Red is a fantastically original study of the interaction between cultural producers, urban planners, and city residents in the creation of urban space. Challenging the conventional view of urban culture as a response to the physical reality of the city, Braester shows how Chinese filmmakers and stage performers were often directly involved in the building of that reality. Focusing on the period from the 1950s to the present, Braester sees dramatists and filmmakers acting as cultural brokers, helping to forge an “urban contract” between planning
authorities, real estate developers, propaganda officers, and city dwellers. Collectively, the parties to this contract promoted the developement of Mao-era Beijing and Shanghai, the gentrification of contemporary Taipei, as well as the revamping of Beijing in the lead-up to the 2008 Olumpic Games.

Braester examines over a hundred Chinese films and plays, blending in rich archival material related to the circumstaces of their production and interviews with individuals involved. His exemplary scholarship demonstrates the vomplrc nature of “art worlds,” while making an elegant and important argument about the significance of cultural production to shaping the world in which we live. Theoretically astute yet virtually jargon-free in its formulation, the book combines excellent sinological research with a genuine contribution to drama and film studies, urban
studies, and political history. Braester’s work encourages us to take a fresh look at cities we thought we knew, and to reconsider the way we look at cities and their culture in general.

http://faculty.washington.edu/yomi/PCR.html

Professor James Tweedie has received an RRF award for the 2012-13 academic year, for his project “Mannerist Cinema: Film, New Media, and the Late Twentieth Century.”  Congratulations!