Student Research and Awards | Cinema & Media Studies

Awards and Achievements

Gerry Hwang Wins BUCH Digital Creator Award
May 20, 2025
CIMS Senior, Gerry Hwang, has won this year's Digital Creator Award in the visual category from the Boston University Center for the Humanities for his film The Lonely Jazz Singer. [ More ]
CIMS Student Accepted to Masters at Columbia University
May 6, 2025
CIMS Minor, Hiayi Bi, will go on this Fall to begin her masters in Data Journalism at Columbia University. She says that this step "stems from a deep commitment to... [ More ]
CIMS Student Safiyah Young Wins Prestigious BUCH Award
April 21, 2025
CIMS Junior, Safiyah Young, is the recipient of the Alice M. Brennan award in recognition for her excellence in humanistic studies from the Boston University Center for the Humanities. Safiyah is... [ More ]
Yiru Pan Accepted to Masters Program
April 10, 2025
Cinema & Media Studies senior, Yiru Pan, was recently accepted into the BU Masters in Television program within the College of Communication. Growing up, Yiru loved science fiction films and... [ More ]

Internships

Melissa Onwuka, a junior concentrating in Cinema & Media Studies completed an internship at Groundswell Productions in Los Angeles in Summer 2021. As part of the internship she had to familiarize herself with all parts of the production process: reading and writing coverage on incoming screenplays of many different genres, searching for news stories that could make for an interesting script, and keeping the company’s database organized.

Of her experience, Melissa writes: “Having grown up in Nigeria and had my only experience in the film industry be in my hometown, it has been great to have a supervisor at Groundswell who walks us through the industry in America and all its moving parts. Sometimes, it can be daunting, but most of the time it’s exciting. Groundswell runs a year-round internship program for undergraduate students, and I am lucky to have stumbled upon this opportunity!”

Honors Projects and Essays

Honors Projects

Violet Chen, CIMS ’25

Topic: Alienation and Assimilation: Rethinking Asian American Cinema

Wendy Morera, CIMS ’25

Topic: The Politics of a Lens: Věra Chytilová’s Manipulation of Looking

Notable Essays

As part of her course on “Women, Feminism and Television,” CIMS major Kaitlyn Riggio examined the role of gender as a narrative tool in the reality series, Survivor. Her insightful essay, “Real-World Gender Dynamics as Narrative Tools in Survivor: Vanuatu” explores the way that producers exploit pre-existing power relations in order to transform the so-called reality show into a highly constructed narrative of “gender battle.”

As part of her course, “Modern Korean Culture Through Cinema,” CIMS major Christina Xu investigated the critique of capitalist domesticity in Kim Ki-duk’s ethereal film, 3Iron. Focusing her analysis on the relation between verbal and non-verbal spaces in the film, Christina brilliantly shows how the film transforms our perception of the home through scenes of ghostly, silent witnessing. Ultimately, she argues, the film creates the cinematic equivalent of a silent protest against the structures of ownership and violence that otherwise define social relations.

Meanwhile, CIMS major Danielle Momoh drew on Judith Butler’s landmark theory of gender performance as a lens to analyze the Netflix series, Stranger Things. As Danielle perceptively illustrates, the show’s protagonist Eleven hollows out the expectations of “innate femininity” that are projected onto her, before finally assuming a threatening but also surprisingly powerful androgyny, like that described by Virginia Woolf, “resonant and porous…incandescent and divided.”