Amanda Greer

Amanda Greer is a PhD Candidate at the CSI. Her dissertation, supported by a SSHRC grant, a Doctoral Excellence Award, and a Vivienne Poy Chancellor’s Fellowship, develops a theory of pedagogy as cinematic form in the post-WWII social guidance film. Drawing from feminist methodologies, Michel Foucault’s work on discipline, and critical pedagogical theory, this project argues for the disciplinary cinematic formation of pedagogical relationships between student and teacher in educational films. Taking up cinematic techniques like freeze frames, superimpositions, and acousmatic voiceovers, this project argues for pedagogy as a disciplinary device in social guidance cinema, one that shapes, moulds, and forms the films’ student body, constructing normative notions of adolescence. More broadly, her work investigates feminist theory, cinematic form and formalist reading strategies, educational film, useful cinema, Classical Hollywood, the teen girl in cinema, and American film history.

Her work can be found in The New Review of Film & Television Studies, Film & History, Film Criticism, and Sound Studies. In 2020-2021, she served as a Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Ethics, launching a speaker series titled “Ethics, Aesthetics, Feminisms.”

From 2018-2022, she has served as Assistant Production Editor for Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal).

She currently serves as Graduate Educational Developer with the Teaching Assistants Training Program, housed at the Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation.

Please reach out over email with any queries, or to chat about pedagogy and cinema.

Awards

• 2022-2023 Vivienne Poy Chancellor’s Fellowship in the Humanities & Social Sciences, University of Toronto
• 2022-2023 Ontario Graduate Scholarship (declined), University of Toronto
• 2022 TA Teaching Excellence Award, Teaching Assistants Training Program/Centre for Teaching Support & Innovation, University of Toronto
• 2022 Department of Visual Studies Teaching Assistant Award in Cinema Studies, University of Toronto Mississauga
• 2021 & 2022 Doctoral Completion Award, University of Toronto
• 2020-2021 Doctoral Fellowship, Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
• 2020 Doctoral Excellence Award, University of Toronto
• 2019 Graduate Student Essay Prize, Comedy SIG, Society for Cinema and Media Studies
• 2018-2021 SSHRC Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Doctoral Scholarship
• 2017-2021 University of Toronto Faculty of Arts and Sciences Top (FAST) Fellowship
• 2016 William M. Jones Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Paper, American Culture Association

Courses Taught

• CIN260H1F: Melodrama (Summer 2020)
• CIN360H1S: Contemporary Film Theory (Winter 2023)