Faculty

The National Film Registry board strove to make the list of 25 new films added annually more representative of a wider spectrum of American life, and two years ago formed a task force on diversity, equity and inclusion.

“The board has been asking, ‘How many more John Ford or Albert Hitchcock films do we put on the registry?,” said Jacqueline Stewart, University of Chicago Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, who was tapped to chair the task force, told TIME. “It seems like we’ve covered a lot of those bases—and because of the sheer number of films on the registry, we absolutely have to broaden our horizons, and engage with archives and film critics and scholars and the American public to help us bring a wider variety of films into view.”

Driven by an immense pedagogical curiosity, Lauren Berlant has spent more than three decades studying, analyzing, and writing about what sentimentality means in American culture for gender, sexuality, and politics. For her perceptive interpretations of American literature, politics, and culture, Berlant will receive the 2019 Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association at the MLA Conference in Seattle on January 11, 2020.