Ithaca College

Matt Fee, director of the Park Scholar Program and a lecturer in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts, recently delivered two presentations on Irish film.

On March 11, Fee presented a paper at the annual conference for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in New Orleans, Louisiana. Fee's presentation "Celtic Tigers, Pink Panthers and Irish Cinema’s Queer Urban Sites" examined how depictions of gay men and lesbians in recent Irish films simultaneously map the Emerald Isle’s urban spaces as decidedly "queer" sites.

On March 15, Fee delivered the opening lecture for Le Moyne College's "Irish Culture Week." In his address "The Rural Horrors of Contemporary Irish Cinema," he presented how various films transform pastoral Ireland—historically visualized by tourism, American cinema and Irish nationalism as a space of lush green fields and languid farms—into a shadowy space of menace and murder, of the uncanny and the irrational. Arguing that these films do more than simply hearken back to earlier discourses surrounding rural Ireland, Fee demonstrated how these works visualize contemporary anxieties surrounding the place—or lack thereof—of the rural in a post-industrial and globalized Ireland.