The Center for Television Studies (CTS)

This project studies the formal aspects of television in relation to other art forms and the phenomenological aspects of television viewing by humans and other animals, especially cats.  Films, novels, and other visual arts such as painting and photography provide valuable analytical points of reference, and aspects of writing, cinematography, directing, sound, lighting, and production are analyzed.  The viewing studies emphasize space, layout, and viewer bodily response to television.  

 

2. Television as Literature:

This project seeks to investigate television as a form of literature with important points of contact in practice and scholarship with the written tradition. If films are identified with short stories, some television is linked to the novel in terms of the capacity for expanded storylines and development.  While the serialized novel was a staple of pop culture which later came to be treated as literature, serial television seems now to be undergoing a similar transformation.  And, just as with the novel, viewers read and interpret television.

 

This research seeks to track changes in viewing habits along with technological change in the television medium, evaluating how VCRs, DVDs, TiVO and DVRs, webcasting, and devices like the Apple TV and the iPod have modified the ways in which viewers access television programs.  

4. Nuclear and National Security Television:

This study investigates the ways in which themes of nuclear weapons and nuclear war have been figured in television, how the representations have changed over time, and how these programs serve as points of thought or dialogue about nuclear weapons.  National security and war have been central themes of much television across the globe.  In societies that have keen psychic and financial investment in national security, but where much of the work of security takes place in secret, television serves as a medium by which many citizens engage aesthetically with the practical and ethical questions of national security.

 

5. Transitional Characters in Television:

This research at the CTS focusses on television characters who undergo some profound change of state, such as transitioning species or from demon or cyborg to human.  This transformation entails a process of re-exploration of their own identity and of their social relations.  Following Nietzsche’s argument that some aspects of reality are transmuted into art to facilitate reflection about them, often through removing blockages or providing novel points of view, this study considers the experience of transitional characters in tandem with the experiences of migration and transgender transition, where an important movement or change of state produces changes in identity, social identity, and interaction.

 

6. Television Dissemination and Reception

This line of inquiry studies how televisual forms spread in different national and cultural contexts and both take on particular resonances there and create a larger ‘international’ text that provides an object of dialogue across these contexts.  Research includes viewing and reception of the same program in different countries and effects produced in the translation of programs into different language contexts.