PAMLA Forum: Acting, Roles, Stages

Please join us for our annual PAMLA Forum, always a highlight of our conference, beginning immediately after a brief PAMLA General Membership Meeting (on Saturday, November 10, at 4:50 pm). At the PAMLA General Membership Meeting find out who has been elected to the PAMLA board, where next year’s PAMLA conference will be held, and to be there for the presentation of the PAMLA Distinguished Service Award.

How do actors, roles, and stages move across the world? This year’s PAMLA Forum, beginning on Saturday, November 10 at 5:10 pm, in the Wilson Library Reading Room, and titled “Acting, Roles, Stages,” features two speakers, Melanie Masterton Sherazi and Michelle Bloom, whose research considers fascinating transnational conduits in film, theater, and literature: how Rome offered a stage for African American artists at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement and the reciprocal relationship between French and Chinese cinema. We look forward to a wide-ranging discussion about the significance of dramatic performance in staging new directions in our field.

 “African American Performers on Stage and on Screen in Cold War Rome”
Melanie Masterton Sherazi
California Institute of Technology

Melanie Masterton Sherazi is a Postdoctoral Instructor of American literature at the California Institute of Technology and a former University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside. Inspired by her archival research into writer William Demby’s papers from Rome, she is currently writing Nero e Rosso: Desegregationist Aesthetics in Cold War Rome (1947-65), about the mixed-genre cultural work produced by African American writers and artists in postwar Rome, often in collaboration with Italian filmmakers and artists. Sherazi edited and wrote the introduction to Demby’s final novel, King Comus, published by Ishmael Reed in 2017. Her work appears in MELUS and Mississippi Quarterly and is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, ARIEL, and Italian Quarterly.

“All the World’s a Screen: Transnational Actors, Global Circulation, and Mise-en-Scène in Cinema”
Michelle Bloom
University of California, Riverside

Michelle Bloom teaches comparative literature, French, film studies, and food studies at UC Riverside. Her most recent book, Contemporary Sino-French Cinema: Absent Fathers, Banned Books, and Red Balloons(2015), considers the crossover between France and China/Taiwan in contemporary cinema through the optics of métissage, translation, intertextuality, and imitation. Her current work continues to explore Sino-French cinemas, with a focus on the culinary. Her articles on food insecurity in films of Tsai Ming-liang, and on maternal food memories in films by Lin Cheng-sheng and Eric Khoo, as well as a co-authored piece on Hou Hsiao-hsien and Taiwan-Japan co-production, are forthcoming. Earlier work includes her 2003 book Waxworks: A Cultural Obsession, which examines depictions of wax figures and wax museums in literature, cinema, history, and popular culture. Professor Bloom has also published on Truffaut and Henry James; Baudelaire and Wagner; Balzac and Champleury; Villiers and Zola.

Please join us for this exciting event and other PAMLA 2018 Conference special events: https://www.pamla.org/2018/schedule