Ithaca College

Patricia Zimmermann, professor of cinema, photography and media arts and codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, delivered two invited lectures in The Netherlands in October analyzing documentary, historiography, and new media in Indonesia.

Her talk “Archives, Historiography, and Recording the Future,” was part of a special workshop probing the Recording the Future project, an long-term archival and ethnographic initiative to document six cities in Indonesia on a regular basis to track changes in public life post-Reformasi. The Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asia and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) assembled anthropologists, sociologists, historians, public health and media researchers to consider this evolving documentation project of everyday life in Indonesia.

At the University of Leiden, Zimmermann presented a lecture entitled “A Gado Gado of Engage Media:  Social Media for Human Rights and the Environment in the Asia Pacific.”  Her presentation was sponsored by the program in Asian Modernities at the University and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies.

Zimmermann dedicated both of her lectures to Dr. John Keshishgolou, the founding dean of the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, who died in August after a battle with cancer.  A friend, colleague, and mentor for three decades, Dr. Keshishgolou, an internationally recognized expert on Asian media institutions, had introduced her to Southeast Asia. They also worked together as visiting professors in the Wee Kim Wee School of Communications at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.