Professor Margaret Flinn’s Film Studies senior seminar this past year took an innovative approach to engaging films and other media. Flinn, graduate student teaching apprentices and students collaborated to produce an issue of Film Matters, a journal that includes both standard scholarly articles and short featurettes (book reviews, DVD reviews, interviews, etc.). The journal issue (Volume 6, Number 2) will appear in print this winter.

In a typical Film Studies course, students regularly read articles published in scholarly journals and may get the chance to write a research paper. There is little opportunity for students to experience the process for the publication of the articles they read and connect it to their own work.

Flinn said, “Usually when dealing with assigned readings or helping students carry out their own research, professors will discuss methodology and approach, but doing double-blind peer review as a reviewer gives a very different kind of insight into types of writing, methodologies and whether an argument/approach is effective or not.”

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