Background, Teaching, and Research

Research Overview

Amelie Hastie's research and teaching focus on film and television theory and historiography, feminism, and material cultures. Her first two books — Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection and Film History from Duke University Press and the BFI Film Classics volume on Ida Lupino’s The Bigamist — are committed to explorations of women’s authorship in and of film history. She wrote “The Vulnerable Spectator” column in Film Quarterly from 2013-2019; her column focused on contemporary US and global film through a framework of psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories, material conditions of viewing and production, and film narratives and aesthetics. Her book on the 1970s television series Columbo — a historical and intertextual study, which considers the possibilities of analysis of television itself, from its broadcast form to its changing incarnations — is forthcoming from Duke University Press. She is currently writing a second BFI “Film Classics” volume on the 1971 Klute, starring Jane Fonda and directed by Alan J. Pakula. She has recently published essays on topics as varied as women's work in the era of "New Hollywood," cinephilia and film theory, Ida Lupino’s television work, Peter Falk's role on Columbo alongside his participation in films directed by independent filmmaker John Cassavetes, and film criticism in the first decade of Ms. magazine. She has edited special issues of Film History on the contributions of women during the silent era and of journal of visual culture and Vectors about the relation between materiality and the moving image. She was a proud member of the Camera Obscura editorial collective for over a decade and currently serves on a number of Film and Media Studies journals. 

Professor Hastie joined the Amerst faculty in 2010 as the founding Chair of the Film and Media Studies Program. She serves as the Faculty Director of the Schupf Fellows Summer Program. 

Education

Ph.D., Modern Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 

M.A., English and Comparative Literature, Modern Studies Program, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee 

B.A., Literature and Society, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 

Selected Publications

Books:

The Bigamist. Film Classics Series, British Film Institute/Palgrave, 2009.

Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History. Duke University Press, 2007.

Forthcoming: Columbo: Make Me a Perfect Murder. Duke University Press, “SpinOffs” series.

In progress: Klute, a British Film Institute "Film Classics" volume. Bloomsbury Press.

Recent Essays in Professional Journals:

“Wandering around the ’70s: Glimmers of a Feminist Practice.” Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 8, Number 3 (Summer 2022): 61–74.

Columbo, Cassavetes, and a Biography of Friendship.” Celebrity Studies 8.4 (Fall 2017): 493-509.

“The Trouble with Lupino.” Cinema Comparative Cinema v 4.8: 50- 56 (2016). http://www.ocec.eu/cinemacomparativecinema/index.php/en/33-n-8-english/409-the-trouble-with-lupino

"The Vulnerable Spectator." Film Quarterly column 2013-2019. 

"The 'Whatness' of Ms. Magazine and 1970s Film Criticism." Feminist Media Histories 1:3 (Summer 2015): 4-37. 

"Cinema of Compassion." LOLA 4 (September 2013): http://www.lolajournal.com/4/compassion.html 

Recent Articles in Collections:

“Genealogies of a Decade: Classifying and Historicizing Women of the New Hollywood.” In Women and New Hollywood: Gender, Creative Labor, and 1970s American Cinema, ed. Aaron Hunter and Martha Shearer, Rutgers University Press (2023).

“The Dreamhouse.” In The Cinematic Child, ed. Karen Lury, BFI/Bloomsbury (2022).

“Passionate Attachments.” In Love and Cinema: Teaching Our Passion In and Out of the Classroom, ed. David Johnson and Rashna Wadia Richards, Indiana UP (2017).

Selected Awards and Honors

2015 Shiveley Fellow, Hendrix College, Conway, AR (November)

2011 Murphy Fellow, Hendrix College, Conway, AR (October)

2005 Humanities Research Institute, University of California – Irvine, Research Group Convener, ‘The Object of Media Studies” (Fall)

Vectors Fellow, University of Southern California 2001-3