Film Studies Research Guide 

About this Guide

This website provides a guide to conducting research in Film Studies at Yale University, highlighting key resources and crucial search strategies.  There are many special aspects to doing Film Studies research, including:

• important but unintuitive search terms, such as "motion pictures"
  
• techniques for finding videos, reviews and screenplays
• intersecting topics, such as how a social group is represented on screen (its role in front of the camera) and its position within the film industry (its role behind the camera)
  
• major topics (such as financial aspects) that are less prominent in other fields within the arts and humanities
• cast and crew information
• and much more
  

Through this website, I try to give you some ways to crack open Film Studies' numerous subjects.  Most of the pages give examples that you can use as a model for your searches, descriptions of the main resources, and tips on how to use certain databases.

It's important to know that even though the guide focuses on strategies for finding books, often the same or similar approaches will work in article databases.

There are also pages for particular classes, and every month I provide a list of books (and sometimes microfilms, databases and other resources) that the Library acquired the month before.

Have questions?  Want to discuss your research needs?  Please contact me!

My official title is "Librarian for Performing Arts, Media and Philosophy," and I select materials (books, databases, videos, microfilms, etc) in lots of interconnected fields: film, theater, philosophy, TV and radio, graphic novels, dance, journalism, cyberculture, performance art, circus ... you get the picture!  I also acquire the DVDs for the Yale College Council collection in Bass Library.

My PhD is from the Interdisciplinary Program in Theater from Northwestern University.  I did my undergrad at the University of Michigan (Residential College, Comparative Literature), and I have both an MA (Comparative Literature, University of Iowa) and an MLS (Simmons College Graduate School of Library Science).  I've published mainly in theater history and theory, and also in social theory and digital humanities.  In addition I've taught theater history and theory at Ohio State University, the University of Washington, Tufts University, and the University of Helsinki.

You are welcome to contact me about your research and resources that you need -- see the information in the box in the right column.