In July 2025, Northwestern’s Rhetoric, Media, and Publics PhD program hosted its seventh Media Aesthetics Summer Institute, a weeklong gathering of graduate students and visiting scholars organized around the theme “Excluded Media.” Convened by Michael Metzger, Pick-Laudati Academic Curator of Cinema and Media Arts at The Block Museum, and Dilip Gaonkar, Professor of Rhetoric, Media, and Publics, the institute invited participants to reflect on what media studies can learn from its gaps, silences, and omissions.
Rethinking the Field of Media Studies
Over recent decades, media studies has expanded both the range of subjects it examines and the kinds of objects it recognizes as “media.” This year’s theme, Excluded Media, turned attention to what falls outside those frames. How should the field respond to persistent pressures that marginalize scholarship, obscure cultural histories, or suppress media artifacts from view?
The theme of Excluded Media asked participants to grapple with these questions directly. Over five days, students encountered scholarship that not only recovers suppressed histories but also proposes new methodologies for attending to media’s silencing and erasing functions. The institute created space to explore how absence, invisibility, and erasure shape conversation within the field.
Applications to the 2025 institute nearly doubled from the year prior, drawing a cohort of about fifteen master’s and doctoral students from across the United States, including participants from Northwestern and the University of Chicago. Each day followed a distinctive rhythm: a public lecture by a visiting scholar in the afternoon, followed by a morning workshop the next day where participants closely discussed a pre-circulated essay with the same author. Screenings and informal gatherings extended the week’s conversations beyond the seminar room.
Visiting Scholars
Four guest faculty members represented a range of perspectives in cinema and media studies:
- Michael B. Gillespie (New York University) is author of Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film (Duke University Press, 2016), which reconceptualizes African American cinema as a negotiation between art and the idea of race. Gillespie’s research spans film, popular music, and contemporary art, and he is co-editor of Black One Shot, an ongoing art criticism series. His talk and workshop explored Black expressive culture across diverse forms, from cinema to comic books to Nina Simone outtakes.
- Genevieve Yue (The New School) is author of Girl Head: Feminism and Film Materiality (Fordham University Press, 2020), a study of feminism and cinema told through the figure of the “China girl” or “leader lady”. Her current work links the extractive history of silver mining in California’s Owens Valley to diasporic Chinese communities and the birth of photography. Yue’s workshop drew connections between experimental film practices, environmental history, and the material conditions of cinema.
- Kartik Nair (Temple University) studies the infrastructures and material conditions of global genre cinema. His research spans Bollywood, horror, and visual effects, and his forthcoming book, Seeing Things, explores censorship, circulation, and the spectral traces of production infrastructures in Indian cinema. At the institute, Nair guided participants through his writing on labor in The Invisible Man, showing how cinematic invisibility can mirror the hidden work of stunt and effects artists.
- Cait McKinney (Simon Fraser University) is author of Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Duke University Press, 2020), which won the Gertrude Robinson Best Book Prize and was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Their research explores activist information networks, queer digital disruption, and the politics of absence in media environments. At the institute, McKinney’s lecture examined the legacy of ACT UP’s “blackout” strategies, revealing how the creation of media absences could themselves be forms of protest.
Screenings and Archival Encounters
Alongside lectures and workshops, the institute incorporated screenings and hands-on archival experiences aimed at introducing participants to the unique holdings at archives across Chicago. Films and videos preserved at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Flaxman Library, the Chicago Film Archives, and Media Burn were presented to participants, highlighting the role of archives in recovering forgotten histories.
Metzger also introduced 16mm projection into the classroom, allowing students to handle film strips and view rare 16mm films such as My Childhood: James Baldwin’s Harlem. The experimental documentary, narrated by the celebrated author and broadcast on public television in 1964, has never been preserved or released digitally. For Metzger, My Childhood reflects the stubborn reality that, whether by neglect, design, or sheer circumstance, significant works of media and cultural history remain excluded from public view.
“As a curator and educator, I’m committed to thinking with such objects, and giving students the tools to wrestle with the material challenges they pose,” Metzger reflects. “In academic spaces, the practical side of media– preservation, presentation, and perception–too often gets sidelined by concerns of theory and interpretation. Bringing film projection into the seminar room created a different atmosphere, one that combined rigorous academic inquiry with a collective experience of presence and contemplation.”
Extending Conversations from Block Cinema
While not formally a Block Museum program, the Summer Institute reflects concerns central to Block Cinema’s curatorial practice: preservation, suppressed histories, and engagement with overlooked media traditions. Relationships forged during the institute often continue through collaborations at The Block, enriching its role as a hub for dialogue across disciplines.
“The Summer Institute gave us a chance to think with graduate students and distinguished scholars about questions that also motivate our work at the museum,” Metzger says. “It strengthens the intellectual ecosystem we are part of, and helps shape the ways we imagine cinema programming in the years ahead.”
