Robert Burgoyne is a writer and lecturer whose work centers on the representation of history in film. He is the author/editor of seven books, including the recent The New American War Film.  He was formerly Chair in Film Studies at The University of St Andrews, and Professor of English at Wayne State University. 

Kim Nelson is the Director of the Humanities Research Group and an Associate Professor of Film at the University of Windsor, Canada. She makes and teaches documentary and film theory. She also works in Live Documentary, merging the documentary with the lecture and town hall. She is the author of Making History Move (Rutgers University Press 2024). Nelson holds a PhD from the Film University Babelsberg KONRAD WOLF in Potsdam, Germany.

John Trafton is a visiting assistant professor at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he teaches film, media, and visual culture. His work explores history on film and the links between visual culture and film narrative strategies. His most recent book, Movie-Made Los Angeles (Wayne State UP, 2023), explores how painting, photography, architecture, and tourism in Southern California contributed to the formation and rise of the Hollywood studio system.

Find out more about John’s work at www.johntrafton.com  

A look at how post-9/11 cinema captures the new face of war in the twenty-first century. Drawing attention to changes in gender dynamics and the focus on war’s lasting psychological effects within recent films, Robert Burgoyne demonstrates how cinema both reflects and reveals the national imaginary.

Making History Move builds upon decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture, proposing a methodology of five principles to analyze history in moving images in the digital age, charting a path to understand the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past.

Author John Trafton explores how Hollywood, an industry based on world-building, was the product of photography, painting, and tourist promotion in the land of sunshine. A more complete story of the American film industry’s ascendency in Los Angeles emerges when one considers how the City of Angels cultivated its self-image through pre-cinema narrative art.