Ithaca College

Four faculty members and four students have been chosen for the Park School of Communication's annual writing awards, endowed by an anonymous alumnus.

Arhlene Flowers, Associate Professor of Strategic Communication, was chosen for her book, Global Writing for Public Relations: Connecting in English with Stakeholders and Publics Worldwide published by Routledge in 2015. It is designed to provide multiple resources for students and public relations practitioners to learn the best practices for writing in English to communicate and connect with a global marketplace.

Matthew Holtmeier, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Screen Studies and  Andrew Utterson, Assistant Professor, Screen Studies were chosen for their articles.  Holtmeier's “The Modern Political Cinema: From Third Cinema to Contemporary Networked Biopolitics.” published in Film-Philosophy  analyzes two political films set in Algeria, Battle of Algiers (1966) and the more recent Outside the Law.  It addresses a qualitative shift in post-1990 political cinemas in what Noah Chomsky refers to as the “new era of globalization.” Holtmeier’s essay has been expanded in his forthcoming book, Contemporary Political Cinema and the Production of Subjectivity to be published by Edinburgh University Press.  Utterson's  piece, “On the Movie Theater as Haunted Space: Spectral Spectatorship and Existential Historiography in Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin  published in the prestigious  Quarterly Review of Film and Video reflects on the movie theatre as a physical and symbolic site and explores the relationship between cinema and new technology from multiple angles.

 Steven Ginsberg, Pendleton Endowed Chair and Assistant Professor who is located at our Pendleton Center in Los Angeles was selected for his blog "Notes from a Chair”.   Through this platform he regularly taps into timely and interesting topics while at the same time incorporates just enough external sourcing to allow the articles to step beyond the insularity that is characteristic of many blogs. It has an extensive following among students, academics, and communications professionals.

For our student essay awards, Grant Brighter  (Cinema and Photography ‘19) was honored for his research paper "Warped Space-Time: Exploiting Schematic Assumptions in Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946)”.  The faculty writing award committee members  were impressed with the rigor of the author's research, the intellectual dexterity of his critical and theoretical engagement, and the clarity of his thesis in arguing for the value of applying foundational psychologist Frederic Bartlett's work on “schemas” to Deren's experimental explorations of cinematic space and time.

Jenna Mortensen  (Communication Management & Design ‘19) was selected for her long-form journalistic article   “A Village Divided,” on the impact of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) on one Pennsylvania town.   The committee members commended the author's attention to preparatory research, the seriousness and sense of purpose in her writing, and her ability to both engage a pressing issue and make it compelling through insightful interviews and a command of prose, all the while revealing something new about the world we live in.  

There are two student winners for the creative writing award. Emma McGovern, (Cinema and Photography '18) wrote a script “Among the Reeds”, a fantasy drama set in the heartland of this country a century ago yet it deals with timeless issues of loss, abuse and childhood dreams. Tyler Macri's , (Cinema and Photography '18) script “What Comes From a Swamp”also deals with a fictional creature in this story of siblings from a dysfunctional family coming of age literally carrying the burdens of their childhood.