Fellow in Focus: Professor Michael Aronson

Recorded, May 21 2024. Trinity Long Room Hub Visiting Research
Fellow Professor Michael Aronson (University of Oregon) in
conversation with Professor Ruth Barton (Department of Film
Studies, TCD). During his fellowship at Trinity in collaboration
with Professor Ruth Barton, he is mapping Dublin’s history of
silent era cinemas. Bio I am a film historian with a background in
filmmaking, specifically in the camera department on TV commercials
and music videos (back when you were more likely to find them on
MTV than YouTube). I'm a historian because I like old stuff, and
digging around both online and in archives, to find out things
about the past. Probably because of my own history as a cameraman,
a lot of my work focuses on the intersection of what academics call
"Industry Studies" and "Reception Studies," which is just a fancy
way of saying that I am interested in the people that made or
showed films and the various types of communities that ended up
watching them. In the case of the Ed's Coed article, for instance,
Elizabeth Peterson, the University's Cinema Studies Librarian and
myself worked together to write a history of the making
of Ed's Coed, a feature-length romantic comedy made by some
sixty University Oregon students here on campus in the late 1920s.
Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/