Bio

Jennifer Lynn Peterson (PhD, University of Chicago) is a cinema and media historian, educator, and writer living in Los Angeles.

I’m the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). My scholarly articles have been published in journals including Representations, Feminist Media Histories, JCMS – Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, and Getty Research Journal. I have published chapters in several edited anthologies including The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, Ends of Cinema, Hollywood on Location, Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm, The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender, and Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States. My film, art, and book reviews have been published in Critical Inquiry, JCMS, Millennium Film Journal, Texte zur Kunst, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Artforum.com, and Contemporary Art Review LA (Carla). Previously I was a tenured Associate Professor in the Film Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. After returning to my home state of California, I’m now a Professor in the Filmmaking Program at Woodbury University in Los Angeles, where I teach courses on film and media history and analysis. I’m also a Member of the Board of Los Angeles Filmforum. I was born and grew up in Santa Barbara, CA. I’m the first in my family to attend college. I live in Northeast Los Angeles (unceded Gabrieliño/Tongva land) with my spouse, two kids, a big dog, and a school of small fish.

I’m currently completing my second book, Conservation Motion Pictures: Silent-Era Cinema and the Production of Nature, under contract with Columbia University Press. Much has been written about the early nature conservation movement in the U.S., but surprisingly little has been written about its use of motion pictures, even though film has played a crucial role in conservation from the start. Indeed, the shared timeline of early conservation and early cinema reveals surprising stylistic, environmental, and political resonances. This book tells a different story about silent-era film history that includes government films and commercial films that have been excluded from canonical histories. Grounded in archival research, I analyze Hollywood features shot on location in “wilderness” settings —Valley of the Giants (1919, 1927, and 1938 versions) and Mantrap (Victor Fleming, 1926) — alongside “useful” nonfiction films such as A Forest Axiom (USDA, 1929), The Story of Our National Parks (National Park Service and Rothacker Film Manufacturing Co., 1924), and State Parks Bond Film (Save-the-Redwoods League, 1929). Early conservation grappled with the then-new scientific concept of species extinction just as motion pictures enabled the depiction of wildlife in its habitat. As my book shows, these films were bound up with social, racial, and gender hierarchies and were influenced by the era’s colonialist and eugenics thinking. At the same time, they positioned themselves against the era’s accelerating forces of extraction. Complex and contradictory, these films inaugurated many aspects of environmental media that are still with us today. My other current projects include new writing on ecology in experimental film and media, and a textbook on Media and the Environment.