Ithaca College

The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) named Patricia R. Zimmermann, professor of screen studies and co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, a pioneer in the field for her research, publications, and books in amateur film history, documentary theory and history, film archives, nonprofit institutional histories, critical historiography, and new media documentary studies.

Dr. Hend Alawadhi from the University of Kuwait interviewed Zimmermann in a wide-ranging ninety-minute session about her career and research available online for the Fieldnotes initiative of SCMS. Fieldnotes featured forty international scholars whose groundbreaking work defined the discipline.

Fieldnotes is an SCMS project to conduct, circulate, and archive interviews with pioneers of film and media studies. In addition to recognizing the contributions of key scholars, the project also aims to foster knowledge of and interest in the diverse and dynamic developments that have shaped -- and continue to shape -- our expanding field. Fieldnotes is conceived as an oral history project of the discipline.

Fieldnotes is currently led by Dr. Chris Holmlund from the University of Tennessee with the help of a committee comprised of Dr. Haidee Wasson from Concordia Universitiy and Dr. Mike Zryd from York University. It was initially funded by SCMS, the Advanced Research Team on History and Epistemology of Moving Image Study (ARTHEMIS), and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture (FRQSC). 

Zimmermann’s interview can be viewed HERE.