Aug. 30, 2019
For Immediate Release

Waterloo – The 44th annual Toronto International Film Festival begins on Tuesday, Sept. 5 and runs until Sunday, Sept. 15. Wilfrid Laurier University has several experts from the Department of English and Film Studies available to speak.

Sandra Annett, associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, is an expert in digital new media, fan culture and globalization, anime and manga, and Japanese film and popular culture. She is the author of Anime Fan Communities: Transcultural Flows and Frictions, in which she explores the ways that media affect how audiences understand images, create their own works and use media to connect with others. Read more about her research. Contact: sannett@wlu.ca or 519.884.0710 x3175.

Andrea Austin, associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, is an expert in cultural theory. Her research has focused on science fiction film and literature, narrative games and adaptation, posthumanist theory and aesthetics theory, among other topics. Contact: aaustin@wlu.ca or 519.884.0710 x3773.

Jing Jing Chang, associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies, is an expert in Chinese cinema, especially in post-war Hong Kong, and gender and sexuality in film. Her first book, Screening Communities, which was published earlier this year, explores the role of film culture in building narratives of empire, nation and the Cold War in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 60s. She is working on her second book, The Politics of the Invisible, which explores the representation of sex and sexuality in Hong Kong cinema. Contact: jchang@wlu.ca or 519.884.0710 x3151.

Russell J. A. Kilbourn is a professor in English and Film Studies, specializing in film theory, memory studies, comparative literature and adaptation. Kilbourn has published many book chapters and journal articles. His books include: Cinema, Memory, Modernity: The Representation of Memory from the Art Film to Transnational Cinema; The Memory Effect: The Remediation of Memory in Literature and Film, co-edited with Professor Eleanor Ty; and W.G. Sebald’s Postsecular Redemption: Catastrophe with Spectator. His next book, The Cinema of Paolo Sorrentino: Commitment to Style, will be published in 2020. Kilbourn is also one of the founders of the Posthumanism Research Network (based at Brock University and Wilfrid Laurier), and his current research interests include posthumanism, the postsecular and Inuit cinema. Contact: rkilbourn@wlu.ca or 519.884.0710 x2380.