Teaching and studying abroad triggered my fascination with interdisciplinary research on film. In 2012, when I was getting my bachelor’s teaching degree in Ukraine, I was the first person from Zaporizhzhya National University to have chosen to get practical experience in teaching English in a foreign country. I pursued a volunteer teaching assistantship in Sofia, Bulgaria where in absentia of any other common language I connected with my high-school students through the visual language of digital media and film. In 2014, I spent a semester studying Comparative literature at the graduate level in Estonia. I not only excelled in the research of the intertextuality of literature and film but also seized an opportunity to become a part of the 2014 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. Doing Russian-English interpretation for the filmmakers and assisting in the festival organization familiarized me with the film festival industry and showed me that global cinema had its own ecosystem integral to the cultural geographies of the world.  

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In 2016, I applied for a top-tier Fulbright graduate academic fellowship to do intensive research in film and literature, become a cultural ambassador, and participate in an intercultural scholastic dialogue on a global scale. I chose to pursue an English MA with a Film Studies concentration at North Carolina State University. That fellowship gave me access to resources and faculty that allowed me to study cinema in relation to other visual media, art history, literature, semiotics, film theory, and cultural studies. In the research projects that I’ve taken on at NC State, I have examined genre conventions and combined field-specific elements from hard sciences and liberal arts to explore the ways in which cinema serves as a mediator between science, technology, and society.

As a first-year graduate researcher, I studied the metaphoric language of Wassily Kandinsky’s art of synesthesia as a precursor for cinema, applied the paradigm of the seven basic elements of art to question the gender binaries of the formal features of the portal sequences in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Annihilation, and interpreted the “unlikely romance” in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a posthumanist love story of a Digital Mind and a Manic-Pixie Dream Girl.

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I first presented the latter revisionist paper at an Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference of Georgetown University that both challenged my ideas and inspired me to look for new presentation formats for the scientific research on film. Later that year, I participated in the NC State Graduate Research Symposium. I shared my findings and argued for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as an instructive medium able to break down complex phenomena into visual concepts that can facilitate our understanding of hard sciences, cultural issues, and the many facets of the human psyche.

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What puzzled me most is that in the twelve years the university-wide symposium has been showcasing its students’ best research, I was the first person presenting a cinema study alongside displays from STEM students. The success of my presentation reinforced my belief that cinema is a mode of cross-media storytelling with an immeasurable potential for promoting access to complex research beyond liberal arts. That is why my second-year projects, my capstone, and my prospective PhD research include a multi-media component designed to engage a wider interest in cinema both as an art form and a pathway to better understand the issues of the off-screen world.

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My current projects add cultural, perception, and marketing studies to my research on film. For instance, I am analyzing how Kay Francis’s medical films of the 1930s depict women professionals as incapable of happiness and fulfillment. My research project will include an annotated digital image collection of Francis’s costumes to illustrate my arguments about gender roles in these films. For another interdisciplinary project, I am composing a digital catalogue of 1960’s magazine ads from Playboy and Popular Science to support my claim that science fiction film aesthetics influences the buyer’s demand for hedonic goods, and communication devices in particular. My third project intersects ecocritical and comparative historical research approaches to investigate the intertextuality of formal, genre and narrative elements in Paul Schrader’s First Reformed and Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light to observe the anxiety over annihilation through global calamities – nuclearization of the 1960s and the climate change crisis of 2010s.

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As I plan to advance my teaching career and eventually become a professor of Film and Media Studies, I continue to hone my instruction skills. I am attending professional development courses, as well as digital media and pedagogical workshops under NCSU’s non-credit based Teaching and Communication Certificate Program. It has been a great opportunity for me to reevaluate and improve the experience I’ve had with foreign language teaching and informal education in order to work toward the standards of teaching at the Ph.D. level. As a non-native speaker of English, I realize the need for constant development of my writing skills and practice creating texts in a variety of contexts, from academic papers to writing for the media.

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This past summer, I dedicated my time to learning more about the festival industry in the United States as an intern in the programming department at AFI Silver Spring in Washington, DC. Preparing promotional materials and participating in all the stages of programming at the venue sparked my academic interest in film festivals as platforms for global dialogue. I discovered that little scholarly work has been done on the circulation of foreign and American films in the domestic festivals. Since this is one of the areas I wish to focus on in my PhD studies, I chose to research mapping, distribution, and the cultural flow of foreign cinema in the US as my master’s capstone project, which I will complete in the spring of 2019.

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My research will culminate in visualization of the findings through multi-media platforms to contribute to my goal of making complex research based on multiple disciplines engaging and transparent.