Legacies of USIA Moving Images Through International Lenses

FAIN: RZ-286881-22

Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH 03755-1808)
Mark J. Williams (Project Director: November 2021 to present)

Ten planning workshops and a semi-public symposium on the filmic production and international organizational infrastructure of the United States Information Agency (USIA, known internationally as the United States Information Service, USIS) between 1953 and 1999. (12 months)

The “Legacies of USIA Moving Images Through International Lenses” project will bring together (virtually) a team of renowned international scholars and archivists who are committed to developing international studies of the USIA and its corresponding USIS acronym in offices around the world. This team will schedule a series of ten workshops that develop an interrogative process toward the production of granular analyses of hundreds of USIA films, which will lay the groundwork to identify the opportunities, challenges, and inter-disciplinary potentials to realize new humanistic research about the history and impact of USIA moving images (motion pictures and television/video), especially regarding select areas of the world: Latin America, East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and the U.S. itself. This grant will entail two years of research, workshops, and granular analysis culminated by a major public conference plus publication in a blind-peer-reviewed online journal.