MIRG: Moving Images Research Group

The Moving Images Research Group (MIRG) is a research cluster that brings together faculty, students, and members of the UW community with an interest in cinema, media, and emerging screen cultures. It organizes reading groups and screenings, funds conference travel for students in the Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Certificate program, and presents talks by faculty from UW and other local institutions. It also hosts a speaker series featuring leading scholars from the United States and abroad.

Taking “The Archive” as its overarching theme for 2012-13, MIRG hosts a series of events exploring the diverse objects that remain from the earliest years of moving pictures, the practical and theoretical problems posed by film preservation, the role of documentary films as evidence and testimony, the development of digital archives such as YouTube, and the perennially undervalued archive of moving images shown in domestic settings or through public access media. Guided by this theme, MIRG explores the relationship between the long history of moving images—with film and other media viewed as sources of archival material and fragile objects requiring specialized care and stewardship—and the current worldwide interest in new media and the digital humanities.

MIRG also fosters graduate student leadership through the MIRG graduate interest group.