Anne Friedberg was chair of the Critical Studies Division in the
School of Cinematic Arts
The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) houses seven academic divisions: Film & Television Production; Cinema & Media Studies; John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts; John Wells Division of Writing for Sc ...
at the
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...
and President-elect of the
Society for Cinema and Media Studies The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (formerly the Society for Cinema Studies) is an organization of professors and scholars. Its home office is at the University of Oklahoma, but it has members throughout the world.
SCMS holds an annual confer ...
. An author, historian and theorist of modern media culture, Friedberg received her PhD in cinema studies from
NYU
New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-United States Secretary of the Treasu ...
. She was on the faculty of Film and Media Studies at
UC Irvine
UC may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* ''University Challenge'', a popular British quiz programme airing on BBC Two
** '' University Challenge (New Zealand)'', the New Zealand version of the British programme
* Universal Century, one of the ti ...
, where she was the principal architect for a new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Visual Studies and the founding director and programmer of UCI's Film and Video Center.
In 2003, she joined the USC faculty, where she was instrumental in the creation of the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate and the
Media Arts and Practice Created in 2013, Media Arts and Practice (MA+P) is the seventh degree-granting division of the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Degrees and Programs
The division offers two primary degree programs: a BA and a PhD in Media Arts + Practice. The PhD pro ...
Ph.D. program. In 2009, she was named an Academy Scholar by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motio ...
. She died in Los Angeles on October 9, 2009, at the age of 57.
Friedberg lectured widely in the United States and elsewhere, including invited talks in Berlin, Frankfurt, Bonn, Vienna, Tokyo, Montreal, Bern, Lausanne, Stockholm, Prague, and at the Guggenheim Museum/NY, Art Institute/Chicago, and Getty Museum/LA. In 2001–2002, she was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. During 2005–2006, she was a fellow at USC's
Annenberg Center as a member of the Networked Publics research group.
Friedberg's research and teaching interests included: film and media histories and theories, old media/new media historiographies, critical theory/ feminist theory, nineteenth century visual culture and early cinema, theories of vision and visuality, architecture and film, global media culture.
Her most important scholarly and theoretical work is generally considered to be the recent ''The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft'', which synthesized her previous writing about movies, film, and television, and her long experience as a theorizer of forms of visual experience. Therein, she subjected the common linguistic tropes of visual representation, including "window," "screen", and "the virtual" to rigorous analysis, analysis that in many cases rendered commonly accepted definitions inadequate. Drawing on philosophical and theoretical texts ranging from the art historian Erwin Panofsky to poststructuralists like Derrida, Friedberg proposed that forms of static-image, moving-image, and computer-modeled representation represented significantly different systems susceptible to rigorous analysis.
Several of Friedberg's proposals lay at the center of a larger movement to more precisely and sustainedly interrogate and integrate philosophical, "theoretical" (notably post-structural and French), and art-historical investigations of the nature of human representations and their roots in historical and cultural contexts. Among the most notable of these were distinctions between human sight and photographic representation, proposals on the nature of Durer's "veil," and an argument that Alberti's treatise was misinterpreted due to a failure to read the original Latin. The publication of her book was accompanied by an interactive online companion, ''The Virtual Window Interactive,'' created in collaboration with designer
Erik Loyer Erik Loyer is a digital artist whose work examines identity and memory in the context of new modes of communications afforded by media technologies.
History
Loyer began his work at The Voyager Company, and has done professional interface design wor ...
.
Publications
*''The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft'', by Anne Friedberg (The MIT Press, 2006)
*The Virtual Window Interactive'' @ http://thevirtualwindow.net/
*“Televisual Space”: Special Issue of ''Journal of Visual Culture'', co-edited by Anne Friedberg and Raiford Guins (2004)
*''Close-Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism'', co-edited by Anne Friedberg, James Donald and Laura Marcus (Princeton University Press, 1998)
*''Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern'', by Anne Friedberg (University of California Press, 1993)
*"''Les Flaneurs de Mal(l)'': Cinema and the Postmodern Condition," by Anne Friedberg (''PMLA'', Journal of the Modern Language Association, 1991)
Honors
*Faculty Fellow, Annenberg Center, USC 2005-2006
*Visiting Scholar,
Getty Research Institute
The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts". , 2001-200
*UCI Humanities Center Faculty Research Grant, 2000, 1998, 1995
*UCI Celebration of Teaching Award in the Humanities, 1997
*UCI Humanities Associates Teaching Award 1992
*
NEH
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...
Travel Award, 1991
*
ARTSPACE Artspace may refer to:
* Artspace (website), an online marketplace based in New York City
* Artspace, New Haven, an art gallery in downtown New Haven, Connecticut
* Artspace Mackay, Mackay, Queensland, Australia
* Artspace NZ, a visual arts cent ...
New Writing in Arts Criticism Award, 1988
*
NEH
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency of the U.S. government, established by thNational Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965(), dedicated to supporting research, education, preserv ...
Fellow, Summer Institute, Harvard, 1987
References
*https://web.archive.org/web/20090829181552/http://college.usc.edu/engl/people/faculty_display.cfm?Person_ID=1003266
*https://web.archive.org/web/20080516001020/http://www-cntv.usc.edu/faculty/friedberg-anne.htm
External links
* http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/2808.html
* https://web.archive.org/web/20060908232332/http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10780
* http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-anne-friedberg14-2009oct14,0,4931419.story
* https://web.archive.org/web/20091017022555/http://blogs.indiewire.com/thompsononhollywood/2009/10/12/obit_usc_film_professor_anne_friedberg/
* http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2009/10/farewell_to_a_friend_and_mento.html
* https://web.archive.org/web/20100131031323/http://www.cmstudies.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1235&Itemid=1
* https://web.archive.org/web/20091017205924/http://uscnews.usc.edu/arts/in_memoriam_anne_friedberg_57.html
{{DEFAULTSORT:Friedberg, Anne
University of Southern California faculty
Tisch School of the Arts alumni
University of California, Irvine faculty
Harvard University staff
2009 deaths
Year of birth missing
Presidents of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies