About

My name is Steven W. Thomas, and I am a professor of English at the Wagner College in New York. Film and Media is a blog I created to supplement my various introductory classes on film, media studies, and script writing. This blog is different from my older Theory Teacher’s Blog that was designed for my classes on cultural theory, though sometimes the subject matter overlaps.

I first began this blog during the winter (2012), when I was teaching at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University in Minnesota while I was conducting a workshop on TV script writing for adult trainees in Ethiopia via Skype for Sandscribe Communications, a media company based in Addis Ababa. All of the posts that I made during January 2012 were for the students in that class. You can check out the syllabus [here].

After I moved to Wagner College, I continued to work with Sandscribe Communications to facilitate an international exchange of ideas. In the spring of 2013, I taught a course in which American students at Wagner and Ethiopian students at Sandscribe both studied approaches to film analysis in the context of globalization and connected to each other through various internet tools. Later in 2014, I brought several colleagues from New York to Ethiopia to research the emerging Ethiopian film industry and conduct a workshop on documentary filmmaking. Currently, I am teaching a course on African Cinema both to my students at Wagner and to students in Ethiopia through Sandscribe Communications. My blog serves both as a record of all this activity and as a tool for teaching, communicating, and exploring ideas. Throughout, I aim to be respectful of the diversity of peoples and ideas within Ethiopia, the United States, and around the world.