Charles Acland

Charles Acland

A prominent figure in the field of Film and Media Studies, Charles Acland is Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Communication Studies. Acland has written numerous refereed journal articles (for Film History, Cinema Journal, and Screen, among others), book chapters, and books, and was a past editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies. His most recent book, Swift Viewing: The Popular Life of Subliminal Influence, was published in 2012. Acland is also the editor of a number of anthologies, including Useful Cinema (co-edited by Haidee Wasson), which received an Honorable Mention for Best Edited Book in 2013 from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and was a finalist for the 2012 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book Award. For his 2003 book Screen Traffic, Acland was awarded the Gertrude J. Robinson Book Prize for Best Book by a Canadian Communication Scholar. He is regularly invited to present his research nationally and internationally (e.g., Western University, Harvard, and the University of Warwick). As a complement to Useful Cinema, in 2011 Acland used digital technology to extend the impact of this research, developing the Canadian Educational, Sponsored, and Industrial Film (CESIF) Archive at Concordia University. He is the principal investigator of the CESIF project, which includes the construction of an on-line research database (MySQL), containing more than 3,000 entries for largely forgotten films. Additionally, Acland is a Co-Director (with Darren Wershler) of the Media History Research Centre. In 2012, he was the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Grant for his work with “Popular Film and New Media Platforms” and a Québec Government grant (FRQSC) for his research as a co-investigator for ARTHEMIS. Further, for Project Arclight, Acland, the Principal Investigator of the Canadian research team, and Eric Hoyt, the Principal Investigator of the US team, won the 2013 international Digging into Data Challenge Award. For Project Arclight, Acland has established an interdisciplinary team at Concordia with expertise in algorithmic analysis (McKelvey), digital storytelling (Razlogova), and early cinema and database management (Pelletier).

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