Jane Gaines is the award-winning author of two books: Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice and the Law and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era, both of which received the Katherine Singer Kovacs prize from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. She received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholarly Award for her forthcoming book on early cinema, Historical Fictioning: Women Film Pioneers and for work on the Women Film Pioneers digital archive published by Columbia University Libraries in 2013. This research was supported as well by a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship. She has written articles on intellectual property and piracies, documentary theory and radicalism, feminism and film, early cinema, fashion and film, and critical race theory that have appeared in Cinema Journal, Screen, Cultural Studies, Framework, Camera Obscura, and Women and Performance. Most recently, she has been engaged in a critique of the “historical turn” in film and media studies.
Prof. Gaines taught at Duke University where she founded the film program and was Luce Distinguished Professor at Vassar College as well as Kersten Hesselgren Honorary Chair at the University of Stockholm. As a founder of the Visible Evidence: Strategies and Practices in Documentary Conference which celebrated its 20th anniversary this year, she delivered a keynote address at the 2013 Stockholm event: “The Archives of the Future: Collecting Cloud Evidence.”
