It is with deep sadness that we mourn the passing of Teresa de Lauretis (1938–2026), an internationally renowned feminist and film theorist whose work reshaped the fields of cinema studies, feminist theory, and queer thought. A pioneering intellectual who coined the term “queer theory,” de Lauretis brought semiotics and psychoanalytic theory into transformative dialogue with cinematic representations of desire, gender, and subjectivity. She died in San Francisco on February 3, 2026, at the age of 87.

Born and educated in Italy, de Lauretis earned her doctorate in modern languages and literatures from Bocconi University in Milan before relocating to the United States in the 1960s. She held positions at the University of Colorado–Boulder and the University of California–Davis before joining the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where her cinema studies course drew hundreds of students and helped mark a pivotal moment in the emergence of film studies as an academic field in the United States. At Milwaukee’s Center for Twentieth Century Studies, she participated in a series of historic conferences that brought British and French film theory into sustained conversation with American scholars. With Stephen Heath, she co-edited The Cinematic Apparatus (1980), a landmark volume that confirmed film theory as one of the most influential intellectual movements of the late twentieth century. During this period, she also served on the editorial board of Ciné-Tracts: A Journal of Film and Cultural Studies, one of the earliest U.S.-based film theory journals. The publication of Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984) established her as a formidable and original thinker at the intersection of feminism, semiotics, and cinema.

In 1985, de Lauretis joined the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she remained until her retirement in 2008 as Distinguished Professor Emerita. In 1990, she organized the now-legendary working conference on lesbian and gay sexualities titled “Queer Theory,” a gathering whose name would come to define a field of inquiry that reshaped the humanities in the 1990s and beyond. Essays from the conference appeared in a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies in 1991. Across eight books and more than one hundred essays in English and Italian, she addressed cinema, literature, science fiction, opera, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and feminist and queer theory with rigor and unmistakable stylistic precision. Among her most widely cited works are Technologies of Gender (1987), The Practice of Love (1994), and Freud’s Drives (2008). Her scholarship has been translated into more than fourteen languages and has influenced generations of scholars around the world. In 2010, she received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Beyond her extraordinary intellectual contributions, Teresa de Lauretis was a devoted mentor, an exacting reader, and a deeply generous advisor. As Patricia White reflected, “No one commanded language(s) like Teresa.” Her writing changed the trajectory of feminist, semiotic, queer, and psychoanalytic theory, and her mentorship shaped countless students and colleagues who carry her influence forward. She is survived by her son, Paul Loeffler, and is remembered by a global community of friends, collaborators, and scholars whose lives were enriched by her brilliance and care.

SCMS extends its deepest sympathies to her family, friends, students, and colleagues. Teresa de Lauretis’s intellectual legacy and singular voice will continue to resonate across disciplines for generations to come.

It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Marsha Kinder, Emerita University Professor at the University of Southern California and a pioneering figure in film, television, and digital media studies. Educated initially as a scholar of eighteenth-century English literature, Kinder joined USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in 1980 and spent more than three decades shaping one of the world’s leading critical studies programs. Her scholarship ranged widely, encompassing narrative theory, children’s media culture, representation of violence, Spanish media culture, and the shifting terrain of cyberculture and global media. She authored more than 100 essays and ten books, including Self and Cinema (1982), Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games (1991), and Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain (1993), which included a groundbreaking companion CD-ROM and helped establish new directions in digital scholarship. She also edited influential volumes such as Refiguring Spain (1997), Kids’ Media Culture (1999), and her study of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1999). One of Kinder’s most influential contributions was the Labyrinth Project, the art collective and research initiative she founded in 1999 at USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication. Under her direction from 1999 to 2014, the Labyrinth Project produced a series of award-winning interactive installations, DVD-ROMs, and database documentaries that traveled internationally to museums, conferences, film festivals, and new media exhibitions. These works—at the intersection of theory, technology, and storytelling—helped define the practice and theorization of interactive narrative, transmedia networks, and digital city symphonies. The project received numerous honors, including the Sundance Online Festival Jury Award for New Narrative Forms, a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Best Interactive Project, and a New Media Invision Award for Best Overall Design. A legendary educator, Kinder was known for her demanding yet inspiring teaching and for her extraordinary mentorship. Former students remember her breadth of knowledge, her intellectual fearlessness, and her unwavering support. Many credit her with profoundly shaping their scholarly paths. Marsha Kinder’s influence on media studies is immeasurable. Her scholarship, mentorship, and visionary contributions to narrative theory and digital culture will continue to shape the field for years to come. SCMS extends its heartfelt condolences to her family, friends, colleagues, and to the many students whose lives she touched. We are incredibly fortunate that an overview of her work remains accessible at www.marshakinder.com.

It is with deep sadness that we share the passing of Lauren Rabinovitz, Professor Emeritus of American Studies and Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. A pioneering feminist scholar of film, television, and American popular culture, Dr. Rabinovitz made lasting contributions that continue to shape the fields of cinema and media studies. Her influential books include For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago, Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943–1971, and Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. She also co-edited Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays, and developed groundbreaking digital projects such as Yesteryear’s Wonderlands and The Rebecca Project, among the earliest to use new media for film analysis.

Beyond her scholarship, Rabinovitz was a dedicated teacher, advisor, and mentor who directed at least 19 dissertations and inspired generations of students. Known for her rigor, generosity, and creativity, she sustained and expanded American Studies at Iowa, serving as department chair from 2000 to 2008. She also provided leadership in the wider field as a member of the original Board of Console-ing Passions and through her work with the Mid-America American Studies Association, where she served as Vice President and President and received the Kolmer Award in 2015.

Her intellectual curiosity extended into food studies, where she illuminated how food practices and politics reveal broader histories of modernization, identity, and culture. Colleagues and students alike remember her not only as a brilliant scholar but as a generous mentor whose guidance and support left a lasting mark.

Dr. Rabinovitz’s legacy endures through her influential publications, innovative projects, and the many students and colleagues she inspired. We extend our deepest condolences to her family, friends, students, and colleagues. She will be greatly missed.

Barbara L. Hall (1961-2025), Archivist for the Art Director’s Guild, former Oral Historian and Research Archivist at the Margaret Herrick Library (AMPAS), and co-author of Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Moviemaking, passed away on May 24, 2025, surrounded by her loving family. Barbara’s untimely passing is a great loss to her beloved spouse of 39 years Val Almendarez, her sisters, nieces, nephews, grand nieces and nephews, and her wide circle of friends and colleagues.

To the SCMS community, Barbara was an indispensable expert, aide, and writer who shared her wide and deep knowledge of archival resources about the history of Hollywood filmmaking with generosity, enthusiasm, and discernment. Many members of this organization researched their books, articles, dissertations, and even undergraduate theses, with the benefit of Barbara’s interest and expertise, and due to her commitment to making many archival resources, such as the Production Code Administration files, more accessible to scholars. At the news of her passing, many film scholars described her as a rare archivist who acted as a bridge builder among scholars, journalists, and industry artists and as a scholarly collaborator in the researching and writing of film history.

Barbara grew up in Redondo Beach, California and graduated from the University of Southern California in 1983. She began her undergraduate pursuits as a French major but switched to Cinema-Television after taking a number of film history and theory courses in what was then called the USC School of Cinema-Television; she was particularly drawn to the American film courses taught by Prof. Richard Jewell, who became a life-long friend and mentor (one of Barbara’s last projects before her passing was conducting a SCMS Field Notes interview with Rick). During her senior year (1982-83) she interned at the American Film Institute library under the supervision of Howard Prouty, who would become another life-long friend and mentor as well as eventually a colleague at the Margaret Herrick Library, the library for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The AFI work led to a position in the Special Collections Department of the Herrick, where, between 1983 and 1985, Barbara worked on the library’s newly acquired collections of the Production Code Administration files and the Alfred Hitchcock papers under the direction of Sam Gill. It was at this time she met her husband Val, who was doing research for the National Film Information Service, and who later became a collections archivist at the Herrick.

Barbara left the Herrick in 1985 after her acceptance in the University of Iowa’s M.A. program in Film Studies. After she earned her M.A. at Iowa in 1987, she was accepted in the doctoral program at USC. She cultivated treasured relationships while in both graduate programs and many of these people would become library patrons where she worked as archivist, and remain long-time friends for whom Barbara and Val generously opened their home for social gatherings and sometimes for short-term stays when out-of-towners in the group visited L.A. to do research.

Barbara left the USC doctoral program in 1989 to take a position—which she had a hand in creating—as Oral Historian at the Herrick. This was a role in which Barbara’s personal charm, congenial sociality, and affective investments in the historical past were wedded to her professional expertise in Hollywood film history. And it allowed Barbara to develop her interest in showcasing the significance of multiple crafts and kinds of labor in the studio system while complicating and nuancing historical accounts of Hollywood by attending to the words of those who worked and lived there. The range of oral histories she conducted is dazzling: among them, interviews with Hitchcock’s assistant and script supervisor Peggy Robertson; production designer Alexander Golitzen; costume sketch artist and designer Adele Balkan; agent-producer Sam Jaffe; actress Laraine Day; screenwriter Daniel Taradash; Production Code staff member Albert Van Schmus; MGM foreign department director and Production Code liaison Robert Vogel.

Barbara was active in the Southwest Oral History Association throughout her career, serving as the organization’s president in 1996-97. At the Academy, she transitioned from Oral Historian to Herrick’s Special Collections Research Archivist in 1998, beginning a fifteen-year role for which is best known to many SCMS members, as well as to those who worked in other libraries and archives with significant collections of films and film-related documents, and to biographers, independent historians, and researchers employed in media industries. Barbara’s ability to match archival materials in the Herrick’s Special Collections with patrons’ research and writing projects was perhaps unparalleled (rivaling the talents of her late friend Ned Comstock at USC) and the many mentions of Barbara’s encouraging, knowledgeable, and unfailingly creative archival aid that appear in the acknowledgment pages of  hundreds of books and essays published in the last thirty years are testament to her lasting influence on American film history scholarship. More than one scholar found, through Barbara’s help, not only what they were hoping to find, but also intriguing artifacts that would inspire their next project.

Barbara was also a leader in the Herrick’s move to making some of their materials available in digital format, and her role in selecting case files from the Production Code collection for publication by Gale Publishers (first on microfilm, then in digital form and now accessible to many SCMS members through their institutions’ research libraries) will certainly be part of her professional legacy for many years to come. One of Barbara’s most joyful experiences at this time was her mentorship of, and collaboration with, Jenny Romero, who became Barbara’s successor when Barbara left the Herrick in 2013; Jenny held the position for several years before she left the Academy and later started her current position as the Robert De Niro Curator of Film at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.

Barbara was Corporate Archivist at Warner Bros. during the studio’s tumultuous year in 2013-14. Between 2015-18 she volunteered as a docent at the Los Angeles Public Library, worked as a free-lance researcher and as a Library Fellow at the Writer’s Guild Foundation, organizing their archival library and helping to prep special events. In this position Barbara expanded her knowledge of screenwriting as craft and labor and wrote several essays for the Guild’s magazine Written By, one on the history of writers’ pensions and three essays on facets of the blacklist for the magazine’s special 2015 issue on that topic. During this period she connected with writer-producer Rocky Lang, son of studio-era agent and producer Jennings Lang, to collaborate on a book that would view the history of the Hollywood studio system and its films through correspondence between significant or representative Hollywood figures between the 1920s and 1970s.

In Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Filmmaking (Abrams, 2019) Barbara and co-author Lang juxtaposed letters—137 of them, from such figures as Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Gregg Toland, Dalton Trumbo, Irving Berlin, Hattie McDaniel, John Huston, Cary Grant, Jane Fonda, Tom Hanks—with contextual texts illuminating key films and filmmaking relationships in American film history. The book was a smash success, a best seller for its publisher, inspiring stories on NPR and in Vanity Fair. The co-authors were invited to be interviewed at Turner Classic Movies (TCM) fan film festival and the channel aired, as interstitial material between films, a number of video interviews Lang produced with the grown children of Hollywood figures in which they read letters from their famous parents. For Barbara, who by this time had already moved from outside the archival space to participate at scholarly conferences (such as SCMS and Women and the Silent Screen), serve on editorial boards (for many years on the board of Journal of Film and Video), and publish her work in a variety of venues, this book was a new way for her to expand telling history through the words of the people who lived it, and to explore the overlap between the personal and the professional as a key factor in how the Hollywood film industry has operated.

At the time of her passing, Barbara had been working as Archivist for the Art Directors Guild, where she organized their archival holdings to make them accessible for working guild members. She was especially proud of participating in a cooperative Herrick-Art Directors Guild “Visual History” interview with Jeannine Oppewall, production designer for such films as L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, Catch Me if You Can, Pleasantville, and Bridges of Madison County. Barbara felt art direction and production design has been understudied in our field, and she strived to make a difference by showcasing the creativity and labor of the craft artists in this profession. Her essay, “Art Direction: The Drive to Unite Hollywood’s Designers and Artists,” which documents the complicated history of unionization for this craft labor, was recently published in Hollywood Unions, edited by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola. It provides an indispensable start for scholars to turn their attention to art direction and production design.

As impressive as Barbara’s contribution to historical scholarship on Hollywood filmmaking is, she is also remembered by her family and close friends as an enthusiast of: her family and friends; her pets; travel; new restaurants in L.A.; pie from The Apple Pan; a good cocktail; the work of Stephen Sondheim; The Mary Tyler Moore Show; the movies The Best Years of Our Lives, The Little Shop Around the Corner, and All About Eve; Fred Astaire singing “Just the Way You Look Tonight.” She also loved exploring the history of southern California, especially the history of Los Angeles, and she lovingly curated and displayed relevant California objects (postcards, photos, craftsman-design tiles and ceramics) in the visual design of her home with Val. She was delighted to learn that silent film star Renee Adoree was an earlier resident of her house.

Barbara will be greatly missed by her family, friends, and co-workers. Her influence on Hollywood film scholarship is a lasting legacy for the SCMS and film archiving community.

For those interested in Barbara’s writing on Hollywood history, please enjoy the following:

Rocky Lang and Barbara Hall, Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Moviemaking (NY: Abrams, 2019), with an introduction by Peter Bogdanovich.

Barbara Hall, “ ‘Oh, Pioneers!’ The Academy’s Embrace of Early Film History, 1945-1951,” The Moving Image 13:1 (Spring 2013).

Barbara Hall, “A Diamond Formation: How Things Went Down at the Screen Writers Guild,” “You’ve Been Served: Decoding the HUAC Subpoena,” and “Jarrico v. Hughes,” Written By (Special issue on the Blacklist) 19:5 (September/October, 2015). Written By : September | October 2015

Barbara Hall, “Got Pension? Writers Made it Possible” Written By, 22:3 (April/May 2018). Written By : April May 2018

Barbara Hall, “Gladys Hall” [fan magazine writer, no relation!], Women Film Pioneer Project, eds. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016) Gladys Hall – Women Film Pioneers Project

Barbara Hall, “Art Direction: The Drive to Unite Hollywood’s Designers and Artists,” Hollywood Unions, eds. Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

The transcripts of Barbara’s oral histories for the Academy are cataloged and available at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills.

To listen to a 2019 podcast with Barbara talking about her professional background, researching Letters from Hollywood, and the skills and experiences necessary for a career in film research archiving, go to: Barbara Hall, Hollywood Historian-Episode #96 | Storybeat with Steve Cuden

--Mary Desjardins, with Val Almendarez

Peter Harcourt, An Introduction

Seth Feldman

When Joyce Nelson and I edited our anthology Canadian Film Reader in 1977 we decided to end the book with a chapter entitled, "Introduction." It was too cute a ploy, something I wouldn't do today. On the other hand I've never regretted our choice of author for that piece: Peter Harcourt.

Peter was the Introduction to Canadian Film. He began by introducing it to himself, coming around the long way as so many people did back then. As a University of Toronto undergrad he studied music and played jazz trumpet. Then he off he went to study English literature at Cambridge under the sway of F.R. Leavis who demanded only that the study of anything be productively engaged in the construction of a better world. Like Grierson or fellow Leavis student, Robin Wood, Peter came to believe that film was his path to exactly that sort of critical engagement. The early sixties found him working at the British Film Institute's Education Department, contributing to the film journals of the day and eventually teaching film courses at a number of art schools around London.

England, as it turned out, was prologue. In 1964, Peter wrote a long article for Sight and Sound about the National Film Board's Unit B. In it, we find that self-introduction to his own national cinema:

There is something very Canadian in all this, something which my own Canadianness prompts me to define. There is in all these films a quality of suspended judgment, of something left open at the end, of something undecided…there is also something academic about the way Canadian films have been conceived. There is something rather detached from the immediate pressures of existence, something rather apart. "The Innocent Eye: An Aspect of the Work of the National Film Board of Canada" (Sight and Sound, 34, 1 (Winter, 1964-65), p. 21.

It seems to me that when Peter wrote this he had found his Leavis-mandated cause, the nexus of his critical work: a non-negotiable demand for purposeful detachment, manning the barricades of a space "rather apart."

So began Peter's second work of introduction, introducing this understanding of Canadian cinema, Canadianness, Canada to Canadians themselves. He returned home to a perfect storm of cinematic energies: a crescendo of Canadian documentary at Expo and Challenge for Change; the chaos (creative and otherwise) of a newly subsidized feature film industry, a free for all of emerging talent finding its way into every genre. Peter was hired to add one more ingredient to the mix: university film studies. He founded the program at Queen's in 1967, shaped the emerging York program beginning in 1974 and then went on to his permanent home, Carleton, in 1978.

Peter taught with humanity and passion, weaving together the cosmopolitan refinement gleaned from his London days and the pursuit of his Canadian mission. His classroom was a conversation that often spilled over to the campus pub. No one was left unheard. Peter's former students smile at the sound of his name.

He also wrote - constantly and on everything from European masters and emerging experimental filmmakers to the minutiae of government film policy. I don't recall him attacking films or filmmakers, not even those of the New Hollywood, our principal nemesis. What he did best was to champion filmmakers who mirrored his own discovery of detachment and the something rather apart. His pantheon was made of cinematic slow food, filmmakers who could wait for the point to make itself.

Peter's most lasting introduction - what I will remember him most for providing - was the introduction of all of us to each other. His pursuit of Canadian cinema took place at the personal level, over who knows how many dinners over who knows how many years. He always cited people, no matter how elevated their stature, by their first names. This wasn't entertainment sleaze-speak. Peter really knew everyone across and well beyond the spectrum of Canadian cinema. And he expected them to work for the common goal. If there was an impenetrable cultural divide or a deathless ideological struggle going on, you would never know it from the people sitting at Peter's table. Not even the gender wars could shake his inclusiveness. He told anyone who would listen that feminism was the Copernican Revolution of our times. The cosmos, having shifted, wasn't going to shift back.

That glad, gregarious, prolific acceptance of the future is Peter's great legacy. He writes in his memoirs[1] of being a child in the grey Pre-War English Canada, a soulless, frozen outpost of the dying British Empire. After that, everything got better. Thanks to Peter's introductions, it also got better for everyone whose lives he touched.

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[1] A Canadian Journey: Conversations With Time. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1994.