Aurore Spiers - "Archiving the Past" - Allyson Nadia Field

Name: Aurore Spiers - "Archiving the Past" - Allyson Nadia Field
Start: 2026-03-04T16:00:00-06:00
End: 2026-03-04T17:00:00-06:00
Location: 5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637

Schedule

Wed Mar 04 2026 at 04:00 pm to 05:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, IL, United States, Illinois 60637 | Chicago, IL

Aurore Spiers will discuss "Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927-1978." She will be joined in conversation by Allyson Nadia Field. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op.
About the book: "Archiving the Past" uncovers the story of the women in France who, from the 1920s to the 1970s, played critical roles in the production of global cinema's history: as archivists charged with collecting films and other materials, as witnesses tasked with remembering their own film careers, and as activists committed to recovering women's contributions to film history. Reflecting on how gender politics informs the production of film history, Aurore Spiers recasts the film archive as a site of women's intervention, modeling strategies for inclusivity, recuperation, and liberation within feminist film historiography.
About the author: Aurore Spiers is a film and media historian whose scholarship and teaching focus on women filmmakers, feminist film historiography, and the archive. She currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the College of Performance, Visualization & Fine Arts and the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Texas A&M University. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago in 2022. "Archiving the Past: Women's Film History in France, 1927–1978" (University of California Press, 2026) is her first book.
About the interlocutor: Allyson Nadia Field is Associate Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is the author of "Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film & The Possibility of Black Modernity" (Duke University Press, 2015) and "Acts of Love: Black Performance and the Kiss that Changed Film History" (University of California Press, 2026).