Ellen Scott

Ellen Scott

Assistant Professor, Queens College Media Studies

Ellen Scott received her PhD in 2007 from the University of Michigan’s Program in American Culture with a master’s level certificate from the Program in Screen Arts and Cultures. From 2007 to 2009 she was a Mellon Post-Doctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in the Department of Cinema Studies. Her areas of specialization include media history, African American cultural history, film and media theory, American film history, sound theory, the history of censorship, and cultural studies. Scott’s research focuses on the cultural meanings and reverberations of film in African American communities and her current work is on the historical intersections between Black film reception and the censorship of films with racial themes during the 1940s and 1950s. She has published a book chapter, “Sounding Black: Cultural Identification, Sound, and the Films of Spike Lee,” in J. D. Hamlet and R. M. Coleman, editors, Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader (Peter Lang, 2008); an article, “The Horrors of Remembrance: Jonathan Demme’s Beloved and the Shifting Optic and Phenomenology of Racialized Horror,” in Genders(No. 40, 2004); and a short essay in Urban Archives Notes, a biannual publication of the Urban Archives Department of Temple University. Scott is completing revisions of a book entitledReproducing Civil Rights: Film Production, Censorship and African American Reception. At the University of Michigan, she served on the Committee on Minority Recruitment and Retention for which she co-wrote the committee report to the Board of Trustees. She has also served as the co-chair of the Black Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2007-08).