Image: Film studies faculty Dr. Rielle Navitski has been named the 2025 recipient of the Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award. The Albert Christ-Janer Creative Research Award is given to recognize an outstanding body of nationally and internationally recognized scholarly or creative activities in the creative arts and humanities. The broad spectrum of interests within this award’s scope reflect the accomplishments of its namesake. Albert Christ-Janer was an artist of varied form and endless creativity who became the first Callaway Professor of Art at the University of Georgia in 1970. This award was dedicated in his memory in 1980, seven years after his death. Navitski is a leading film historian whose work examines Latin American and Latinx cinema and visual culture in comparative and transnational perspective. She is the author of two scholarly books. The first, Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil, explores how graphic police reportage and early films focusing on both real-life and fictional crimes and accidents helped build mass media audiences in Latin America’s two most industrialized nations. Taking their cues from lurid newspapers and action-packed serial films from the United States and France, these shocking accounts of murders, thefts, traffic accidents, and other ills of urban life ironically asserted these nations’ claims to modernity. Public Spectacles of Violence was a finalist for the Theatre Library Association’s Richard Wall Memorial Award; it is based on Dr. Navitski’s Ph.D. thesis, which won the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Dissertation Award in 2014, and was completed with support from the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts. Dr. Navitski has further explored intersections between cinema and the illustrated press in several published essays. Dr. Navitski’s second book, Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture between Latin America and France, 1945-1965, looks at the widespread emergence of institutions of film culture—namely film societies, archives, festivals, and film schools—in post-WWII Latin America as a result both of emerging urban middle classes’ desires to gain social prestige through the consumption of art cinema and French cultural diplomacy that made use of film in an effort to restore the nation’s soft power in the wake of military defeat and occupation. Based on archival research conducted in fourteen libraries and archives in nine countries with the support of the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Transatlantic Cinephilia was shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Dr. Navitski has also co-edited two books, Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America, 1896-1960, which combines original essays by contributors with translations of historical documents of the region’s film culture; and Latinx Media: An Open-Access Textbook, which combines chapters written by both distinguished and emerging scholars in an introduction to the topic that is freely available online. The textbook was supported by UGA’s Affordable Course Materials grant and an Affordable Learning Georgia grant from USG. Dr. Navitski’s essays—which additionally explore the international circulation of film stars and film genre conventions from and in Latin America—have appeared in Cinema Journal/Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Screen, Film History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and Revista Iberoamericana, as well as several edited collections.
