Ellen Scott
Assistant Professor
ellen.scott@qc.cuny.edu
Ellen Scott received her PhD in 2007 from the University of Michigan’s
Program in American Culture with a master’s level certificate from the
Program in Screen Arts and Cultures. From 2007 to 2009 she was a Mellon
Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in the
Department of Cinema Studies. Her areas of specialization include media
history, African American cultural history, film and media theory,
American film history, sound theory, the history of censorship, and
cultural studies. Scott’s research focuses on the cultural meanings
and reverberations of film in African American communities and her
current work is on the historical intersections between Black film
reception and the censorship of films with racial themes during the
1940s and 1950s. She has published a book chapter, "Sounding Black:
Cultural Identification, Sound, and the Films of Spike Lee," in J. D.
Hamlet and R. M. Coleman, editors, Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader
(Peter Lang, 2008); an article, "The Horrors of Remembrance: Jonathan
Demme’s Beloved and the Shifting Optic and Phenomenology of Racialized
Horror," in Genders (No. 40, 2004); and a short essay in Urban Archives
Notes, a biannual publication of the Urban Archives Department of Temple
University. Scott is completing revisions of a book entitled
Reproducing Civil Rights: Film Production, Censorship and African
American Reception. At the University of Michigan, she served on the
Committee on Minority Recruitment and Retention for which she co-wrote
the committee report to the Board of Trustees. She has also served as
the co-chair of the Black Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media
Studies (2007-08).
