Program Overview

The Graduate Certificate in Film Studies offers graduate students the opportunity to have their work and interest in film studies formally acknowledged as an important part of their graduate training and as evidence of relevant knowledge for those seeking academic positions and developing related careers. Certificate students benefit from advanced study in a growing field, mentored by internationally renowned, award-winning faculty specialists in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Academic institutions often seek candidates from traditional fields who can also demonstrate pedagogical and scholarly strengths in cinema studies. This certificate program responds to these intellectual and professional currents, providing a clear but flexible curriculum for graduate students whose work intersects with film studies, preparing them with skills and knowledge to research and teach film in order to advance their own work in the field. The Graduate Certificate in Film Studies, as part of a graduate degree, acknowledges and formalizes this specialty area.

Beginning with the assumption that the moving image is ubiquitous in contemporary discourse across cultures and disciplines, the certificate trains future scholars, teachers, researchers, and other film studies professionals in historical, theoretical, methodological, and critical perspectives. In addition, courses in production focus on the relationships between theory and practice. Ranging from the silent era to new media, courses include documentary film; French, Maghrebi and Francophone cinemas; Central and East European film; German and Scandinavian film, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian film; Middle East and pan-Asian cinemas; African and African diasporic cinemas; Hollywood and American independent cinema; Latin American cinemas; emerging and Third World Cinemas; melodrama and film noir; gender and representational studies; digital media; photography; visual anthropology; film theory; and curatorial studies.

Students acquire critical skills and knowledge of both film studies as a discrete discipline with its own methodology and of related perspectives from the disciplines in which they are matriculated. This exceptional intellectual and cultural environment is complemented by colloquia, collaborative research and publishing projects, community service learning and volunteer opportunities, academic exchange, invited lectures and annual film festivals including the Massachusetts Multicultural Film Festival, Arab Cinema Panorama, New Asia Cinema, the Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival and film series from the DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It provides an ideal setting for the next generation of visionary educators, scholars, artists, curators, administrators, business leaders, and policy makers.

Certificate students are defined as those matriculated for a master’s degree or doctoral candidates in any graduate program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst whose application for admission has been approved by the Graduate Film Certificate Program and who are pursuing the requirements for the certificate.