PhD candidate, Meghan Romano is one of four Film and Media Studies Association of Canada (FMSAC) graduate students to receive the Congress Merit Award. The award recognizes and celebrates the academic excellence of deserving graduate students who present their work at Congress.
Meghan's dissertation, titled "Midway Modernism: Newfoundland and Labrador Media Infrastructures," examines how media and infrastructure position Newfoundland and Labrador, often conceived in Canadian cinema studies as a peripheral hinterland, as a mediating midway.
Writes Meghan, "It considers how cinema both documented and catalyzed media-infrastructural developments that transformed Newfoundland and Labrador into a node for global connectivity. Building upon essential scholarship that examines Newfoundland and Labrador cinema culture within the Atlantic Canadian region, my project highlights its spatial, temporal, and conceptual position between, for example, Canada and the world (as a refueling stopover for transatlantic flights), tradition and modernity (as a supposedly backwards place, literally out of sync on the half-hour timezone), and nature and culture. In negotiating Newfoundland and Labrador’s status as a midway (an infrastructural node of modernity), the artists, filmmakers, and institutions I study, many of whom were industrial or government-sponsored, developed a repertoire of formal strategies that I collectively term “midway modernism,” which are aesthetic expressions and attendant ideological effects of what’s between old and new, here and there, centre and periphery. By recovering this overlooked media history, my dissertation offers a richer sense of the specific place Newfoundland and Labrador occupied in both Canadian and international cinema."
Meghan Romano will present at FMSAC conference on Saturday, June 15, 3:30 - 5:00 pm.