Scott Nygren, Professor of English and Director of the Center for Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida, passed away on March 24th, 2014 at the age of 67. Professor Nygren received his BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1968 and his PhD from SUNY-Buffalo in 1972. He joined the faculty of the University of Florida in 1990, after previous positions at the University of Toledo and Ithaca College. He also taught and conducted research in France, Japan, Italy, and China. During more than two decades at the University of Florida, Professor Nygren performed exceptional and extensive service at all levels in addition to his teaching and research. Professor Nygren is best known for his book Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and for numerous essays on Asian cinema, ethnographic film, film theory, and experimental cinema, as well as his own work in video and installation art. Professor Nygren is survived by his wife Maureen Turim, also a Professor of English/Film Studies at the University of Florida, and their daughter Mika.

In Memoriam Scott Nygren by David Desser, Emeritus Professor, University of Illinois

Scott Nygren made a tall, striking figure. I remember asking Maureen (Turim, Scott's wife) how she met Scott and being struck by one comment she made: that they had met at an SCMS in Pittsburgh, when Scott asked Maureen to lunch after hearing her paper, and that Maureen thought he was very handsome. Indeed he was handsome, but what has made me remember this remark was how human it made both Maureen and Scott. Obviously we shared an interest in Japanese cinema, though both Maureen and Scott wrote well beyond this area. Yet it was Japan and Japanese cinema that brought us together in the summer of 1984 in Tokyo. It was a coincidence that we met-I am glad for the opportunity we had both to see some films and just pal around.

My favorite memory of Tokyo and Scott and Maureen is when we went to see Nagisa Oshima in his office. Now anyone who knows Tokyo knows that unless you have explicit directions and perhaps a map (hand-drawn, of course) it is hard to find anything not on a major thoroughfare. We had no map. There are addresses, to be sure, but they aren't used as in the States, except by the postal service. Naturally, we got a bit lost. We interviewed Oshima, and Maureen and Scott asked piercing questions. The interview was most helpful to my own work.

Scott was a pioneer in what we may generally call "postmodern" criticism. To say that his Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History is a brilliant book would be an understatement. What marks it more clearly is that it is the work of a brilliant mind, wrestling with the most timely and important issues of film criticism and theory. In this work and in many of his essays there is something very fierce at play-not that he was snarky about previous scholarship or ungenerous. Rather, that he was formidable in his thinking. He was a genuinely nice person, what we might say, a nice guy, and there are not as many of those as we need. A loss to scholarship-oh yes. But more than that, the world is depleted of someone who can laugh at getting lost on the way to see Oshima, but who could understand and appreciate the fact that this was only too perfect.

It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of Robert Furze (1971-2013), who passed away on March 29, 2013 at the age of 41. Robert was a member of the Faculty of Humanities at Dublin City University (DCU), where his research was supported by a two-year Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS) scholarship. Robert had been a member of SCMS from 2011 to the present.

Robert was awarded first class honours for his B.A. degree in Histories of Modern Art, Architecture and Film at Sheffield Hallam University in 2004, and for his M.A. in Film and Television at DCU. He completed his Ph.D. thesis, entitled "The Visceral Screen: Between the Cinemas of John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg, a Barthesian Perspective,” at DCU in 2011 under the supervision of Dr. Pat Brereton. Robert lectured undergraduate and postgraduate students at DCU in courses on Analyzing the Media, The Social Applications of Film, and Science Fiction Cinema, while supervising M.A. students working on film and multimedia theses. He also taught courses and led workshops at Filmbase, Dublin’s non-profit resource center for aspiring filmmakers.

Robert presented his work at a number of international conferences, including a symposium on "The Writer on Film" at The University of York in 2010 and at "Media in Transition 7" at MIT in 2011. He published essays and reviews in various journals, including Convergence and Estudios Irlandeses; his co-authored articles on Avatar and The Tree of Life are forthcoming. He was completing a contracted book based upon his dissertation at the time of his death, and planning collaborative research on the aesthetic connections between video games and cinema. He was passionately dedicated to his chosen field. We hope that his work will serve as a partial tribute to a career that ended too soon.

It is with profound sadness that we report the death of Alexander Doty, who passed away on August 5, 2012 after being struck by a motorcycle while on vacation in Bermuda. He was 58 years old.

In 2008 Alex became Professor of Gender Studies and Communication and Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at the time of his death. His joint membership in both departments allowed Alex to bring his interests in film and media and LGBTQ studies harmoniously together and he very quickly created a vibrant community of students and colleagues devoted to him and his work. As he often noted, he was excited to be affiliated with the university that had supported Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey’s pioneering work in sexuality studies and was especially honored to become a member of the Kinsey Institute’s Board of Trustees once he joined the faculty. He previously taught at the American University in Cairo, The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and at Cornell University (where he held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Society for the Humanities) before working for many years at Lehigh University, where he also served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Chair of the Department of English.

Alex was born in a military hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts, and after moving about in an "Army brat” childhood he later likened to a theatrical road show, his family settled in west Texas, where Alex eventually received his B.A. in English with highest honors from the University of Texas-El Paso. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he wrote a dissertation on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940s films under the supervision of Robert Carringer.

Alex was the author of two influential books, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minnesota, 1993), and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000), as well as numerous essays on topics including queer authorship, Hollywood stars, and queer representation in mainstream media. He also edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas (2007 and 2008), and co-edited (with Corey K. Creekmur) Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Duke, 1995). He served on the editorial board of many journals, including Camera Obscura, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Velvet Light Trap, and GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. Among the first generation of "male feminist” and gay film scholars to embrace and elaborate the theoretical implications of "queerness,” in his work and teaching Alex not only embraced alternative challenges to mainstream media from queer artists, but located queerness at the heart of mainstream culture through his dazzlingly original readings of seemingly heteronormative films and television programs.

A longtime member of SCS and SCMS, one of Alex’s most notable contributions to the organization was as a founder and chair or co-chair (1990-1991 and 1998-2000) of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus (now Queer Caucus). In addition to vibrant leadership and advocacy that led to the regular visibility of queer scholarship within SCMS, Alex was an enthusiastic participant in the Queer Caucus mentorship program that paired senior and junior scholars.

Alex leaves behind a vast network of friends, colleagues, and students who have been empowered by his work and inspired by his personal example: he was an exceptionally generous scholar and person, whose research and activism were deeply intertwined. He will also be remembered for his campy (but rarely caustic) wit, his fabulous sense of what he called (after Stella Dallas) "stacks of style,” and his outstanding ability to balance the pleasures of popular culture alongside rigorous, politically engaged analysis.

It is with sadness that SCMS notes the death of Professor Paul Willemen, retired Research Professor at the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.

Paul Willemen embraced academic life relatively late, arriving at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1999 after a short spell at Napier University in Edinburgh. He had already built a formidable reputation within film studies. While working for the British Film Institute, he played a key role in the 1970s and 1980s, helping define the subject area in the UK and also helping to shape and mould the subject's theoretical terrain and institutional structures. These earlier years were characterized by his dual commitment to promoting a "cinephiliac” understanding of popular cinema – especially mainstream American cinema – and to promoting an understanding of alternative cinema in all its formal and political diversity. He is particularly remembered for proposing the notion of "Third Cinema” as a way of understanding political cinema.

Paul Willemen helped to illuminate a range of other theoretical pathways as well, including the concept of comparative film studies and the pleasures of and political contexts of the action film, especially in its heroic classical mode. He was vexed and intrigued by the concept of national cinema and his dissatisfaction with the "national” was the spur to his interest in comparative film studies. During this time he co-edited the influential collection Theorizing National Cinema, which joined prior seminal interventions including Questions of Third Cinema (1990) and Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (1994). Paul Willemen's death has deprived us of one of the most accomplished and challenging intellects in our field.

IN MEMORY OF ROBERT SKLAR 1936-2011

It is with great sadness that I must report to you the death of our beloved colleague, Robert Sklar. On Sunday, June 26, Bob had an accident while bicycling in Barcelona with his wife, Adrienne Harris. He lost control of his bike, fell and hit his head. He was removed to a Barcelona hospital with head injuries. At the hospital he was diagnosed as having extensive bleeding of the brain. He underwent brain surgery, but the injuries were too severe for recovery. On Saturday, July 2, he expired from his injuries. He will be cremated and the ashes brought back to New York. Our thoughts go out to Adrienne and to Bob's entire family at this time.

Bob began his academic career as historian of American culture earning a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard in 1965. In 1967 he authored a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald with Oxford University Press, which was followed by an anthology of essays on The Plastic Age: 1917-1930 in 1970. However, it was to the good fortune of his colleagues that he decided to bring his deep general knowledge of American society and culture to bear upon understanding the history of American film and media. His books on American film and television history pioneered a politically informed socio-cultural approach to the analysis of media long before "cultural studies" as a field was invented. His seminal work, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1975), set a standard for historical scholarship in the field that inspires each generation of film scholars anew. Bob brought an historian's breadth and insight to understanding the social forces that shape the emergence and transformation of media and sought to convey in his writing the possibilities and promise of film as a medium of social change.

Bob assumed a leading role in the development of the modern fields of film and media studies. He helped to shape the modern Society for Cinema and Media Studies, taking leadership of the organization at a crucial phase of its development between 1978 and 1981 when it was then still the Society for Cinema Studies. He was also an important advocate for the preservation of our media heritage through his position on the National Film Preservation Board and by helping to establishing the Program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at New York University. Bob began his professorial life teaching history at the University of Michigan and he joined the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU in 1977. Through his thirty plus years of service to the Department (he retired in 2009), Bob was a beloved teacher, mentor, and colleague who led countless courses on the history of American Cinema and trained generations of film historians through his caring and disciplined guidance.

As a scholar and intellectual, Professor Sklar, who began his career as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s, always sought a broader public for his thinking and writing. Aside from his books, that were written with such extraordinary clarity and verve, Bob consistently engaged with that broader public not only in his journalism for national newspapers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and as film critic for the weekly newspaper Forward, but also through his nearly three decade association with the film magazine Cineaste, one of the few remaining independent magazines devoted to sustaining what used to be called "film culture." Bob also served for a number of years served on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival. His extensive viewing experience of world cinema was distilled in the notable, prize-winning, book Film: An International History (1993).

Before his death, Bob co-edited a volume of essays entitled Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style with Saverio Giovacchini, which is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi. He also contributed two essays to the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film that is being edited by three of his former students, Cindy Lucia, Roy Grundmann and Art Simon--the key, opening essay to the four-volume series: "Writing American Film History" and an essay in volume three of the series: "Authorship and Billy Wilder."

Bob always had a keen interest in sport both as a participant and viewer and his avid baseball fandom led him to become a member of the very first fantasy baseball league, Rotisserie Baseball. Bob will be sorely missed by all of us who knew him in his various lives, and in particular by his colleagues here in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU. Yet Bob will remain with us in our fond memories of his kindness, his dry sense of humor and his wise counsel, and through the contribution of his elegant writings to the field. There will be a memorial service for Bob in the fall that will be announced in due course.

Richard Allen
Professor and Chair of Cinema Studies
New York University