Location and Hours:

The Brian Stonehill Library is located in Crookshank 3.
Library Hours
Mondays 12:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Tuesdays 9:00 am – 11:00 am, 1:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Wednesdays 12:30 pm – 2:30 pm
Thursdays 3:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Fridays 9:00 am – 11:00 am, 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm

The Brian Stonehill papers can be found at the Claremont Colleges Digital Library: https://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/gmc&CISOPTR=41#d0e112

Biography

Brian A. Stonehill (1953-1997) was a teacher, scholar, opinion writer, cultural essayist, lecturer, and producer. In addition to an outstanding and visionary scholarly career, Stonehill is remembered for his crucial founding role in the Pomona Media Studies program.

His academic career began at the age of 15 when he enrolled in Haverford College in Pennsylvania. During his undergraduate years, he spent his junior year at the University of Warwick in Coventry, U. K., won the Newton Prize in English Literature, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated with high honors from Haverford in 1973. Stonehill  earned a Master of Arts degree in English with honors in 1974 and his Ph.D. in English with honors in 1978 from the University of Chicago. He wrote his dissertation “Art Displaying Art: Self-Consciousness in Novels of Joyce, Nabokov, Gaddis, and Pynchon,” under the direction of Saul Bellow and Wayne Booth.

In 1979, Stonehill worked briefly as a fiction editor at the Chicago Review before joining the Pomona College faculty as an English professor later that year. During his eighteen years of teaching at Pomona College, Stonehill taught courses in creative writing, arts of persuasion, modern American literature, self-conscious fiction, contemporary film and fiction, contemporary fiction, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, and the principles of visual literacy. He received Pomona College’s Wig Award for Distinguished Teaching three times in 1982, 1987, and 1992, and was a beloved professor as evidenced in course evaluations and student comments submitted for the 1997 Wig Award.

Brian Stonehill served as Chairman of the Humanities Division from 1981-1982 and was promoted to an Associate professor in 1983. Stonehill’s development of the Pomona College Media Studies Program began in 1988 and it became a formal program during the 1991-1992 school year. After his promotion to Professor of English and Media Studies in 1993, Stonehill served as Chairman of the Humanities Division again from 1993-1997.

During the 1980s and 1990s Stonehill contributed book reviews to the Los Angeles Times and several other prominent publications, and was a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He frequently wrote opinion pieces for the Los Angeles Times and The Christian Science Monitor and their syndicates on subjects including the coverage of significant events and new media technologies. He appeared as a commentator on programs such as PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, KCET’s Life and Times series, CBS Network News, National Public Radio, MonitoRadio, NBC radio, and various other local and national radio stations.

Brian Stonehill’s other professional projects during the 1980s and 1990s range from book publication to the production of laserdiscs and the development of interactive CD-ROMs. He published The Self-Conscious Novel: Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon in 1988. In the same year he interviewed French commercial photographer Marc Garanger and recorded a translation in English that was included on the laserdisc, Regard for the Planet: 50,000 Photographs by Marc Graranger which received the Video Magazine award for Best Disc-Only release in 1989. In 1990, Stonehill exhibited the prototype of a visual literacy CD-ROM at the Artists and Activists CD-ROM show at USC while steadily working on another laserdisc project, Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise), which received the Laser Tribune award for Best Special Feature Disc and Best All-Around Disc of 1991. Brian Stonehill was a pioneer in the use of networked computers and the Internet as teaching tools at Pomona College and directed the creation of various Internet sites beginning in 1994. Project sites include the Online Visual Literacy Project and the Pomona Pynchon Page which were both awarded “CyberHound all-star fetch” prizes by Gale Publications online in 1996.

On August 6, 1997, Brian Stonehill died in an automobile accident. At the time of his death, he was writing a novel entitled High Definition, editing a manuscript entitled Media Literacy in the Digital Age which was accepted for publication by University of Texas Press, and producing a CD-ROM entitled Understanding D. W. Griffith.

Brian Stonehill Lecture

The Brian Stonehill Lecture is an annual event held to commemorate the legacy of Brian Stonehill (1953-1997), founder of the Media Studies program at Pomona College. Past lecturers have included:
Tara McPherson (2003)
Constance Penley (2004)
Jacqueline Bobo (2005)
Jim Taylor, PO ’84 (2006)
Page, Screen, Pixel: Media in Transition (2008) with Bill Keller, PO ’70, Bob Stein, Marsha Kinder, Jason Mittell, and Siva Vaidhyanathan
Richard Taylor (2009)
Lynda Obst, PO ’72 (2010)

The campuses provide a variety of field trips, programming, organizations and opportunities for students to explore media studies outside the classroom setting. Many of these activities are student-organized and student-driven.

Broadcasting:

Studio 47 – Student Run Media Production Organization

KSPC 88.7 – Pomona College Radio Station

Student Publications:

The Student Life- Pomona College Student Newspaper

Claremont Independent

Groups:

Claremont in Entertainment & Media (CEM) 

Video at the Colleges:

Visit the Online Claremont Television Network, which features YouTube videos produced by Claremont students.

Intercollegiate Media Studies is one of several intercollegiate programs and departments at The Claremont Colleges. These programs and departments are committed to interdisciplinary cooperation and sharing resources across the campuses.

Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies

Intercollegiate Department of American Studies

Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies

Intercollegiate Department of Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies

Intercollegiate Department of Religious Studies

Intercollegiate Department of Women’s Studies

Academic Links

Introductory Guide to Critical Theory
Hosted through Purdue University, this site introduces overviews to different critical theory perspectives in media studies. The theoretical topics that this site focuses on include: gender and sex, Marxism, Narratology, Postmodernism, New Historicisim, and Psychoanalysis. It is a great site to help in getting an idea of what each path of critical theory entails.

Moving Image Source
Moving Image Source is a website from Museum of the Moving Image about the history of film, television, and digital media. This site features original articles by critics and scholars, an international calendar of screenings and events, and a research guide to over 500 of the best media-related research resources on the web.

The MIT Media Lab
The Media Lab is a place where the future is lived, not imagined. Its domain is applying unorthodox research appreoaches for envisioning the impact of emerging technologies on everyday life–technologies that promise to fundamentally transform our most basic notions of human capacities. Unconstrained by traditional disciplines, Lab designers, engineers, artists, and scientists work together on a broad range of projects.

The Norman Lear Center
Based at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the Norman Lear Center is a multidisciplinary research and public policy center exploring implications of the convergence of entertainment, commerce, and society. Located on the University of Southern Calofornia’s campus, the Lear Center builds bridges between eleven schools whose faculty study aspects of entertainment, media, and culture. Beyond campus, it bridges the gap between the entertainment industry, academia, and the public. This site is a rich resource containing events and publications that are helpful in the rich world of Media Studies.

Screensite
ScreenSite facilitates the teaching and research of film/TV/new media and is designed principally for educators and students. But everyone is welcome!

Terms Used by Narratology and Film Theory
A succinct description of terms often used in film theory. This site offers a good place to start for initial familiarization with film theory terms.

University Film and Video Association
This is the website for the University Film and Video Association, an international organization that blends media production with media history and theory. Over 800 professional media producers and theorists belong to the UFVA, and through this site, many of their articles and works are available. Rescources for media professionals include an online job listing venue, links to annual UFVA conference, and links to sites of media interest which are broken into the categories of institutions, non-profit media organizations, and sustainers.

Yale Guide to Film Studies
This website provides a guide to conducting research in Film Studies at Yale University as well as highlighting key resources and crucial search strategies such as research topics, reference sources and finding books, articles, etc.

Journal Links

Jump Cut: A review of Contemporary Media
Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, is a journal which favors a nonsectarian left, feminist, and anti-imperialist perspective to discuss media issues. This publication, founded in 1974, offers a wide range of radical contemporary media topics and aims itself at a range of audiences including academics, political activists, and media professionals.

Scope: An Online Journal of Film and TV Studies
Scope is a fully peer-reviewed online journal edited by staff and students in the Institute of Film & Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. Scope provides a forum for discussion of all aspects of film history, theory and criticism.

Senses of Cinema
An online journal (of the Australian-based quarterly, Sense and Cinema) devoted to the serious and eclectic discussion of cinema. This online journal features diverse articles and topics centered around Australian film and its history and critique.

General Links

The Association of Moving Image Archivists
The AMIA is a non-profit professional association established to advance the field of moving image archiving by fostering cooperation among individuals and organizations concerned with the acquisition, description, preservation, exhibition and use of moving image materials.

ScreenLex: A Pronunciation Guide for Film and TV Studies
Learn to speak like a film/TV professor. ScreenLex contains key phrases and people’s names from the disciplines of film studies and television studies.

Museum of the Moving Image
This is the website for the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, NY. It offers a comprehensive selection of online exhibitions ranging from archives of classic video arcade games to interactive animated tutorials on the technology behing movies and television. One of the highlights of this site is the rich archive of presidential election campaign commercials from the 1960s to the present.

BFI Screenonline: The Definitive Guide to British Film and Television
A website that offers a wide range of points of entry into British TV and film including history, education, and culture.

Electronic Frontier Foundation
This site is devoted to maintaining public freedom on the digital frontier. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pools the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists and strives to champion the public interest in battles involving digital rights. This site focuses on issues of free speech, intellectual property, copyright law, etc.

David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema
A cinema-centered website created by David Bordwell, a prominent American film theorist, author and professor of film studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This site offers a wealth of film studies-based topics, announcements for upcoming international cinema events, and includes links to other cinema resources, such as Bordwell’s personal blog on film.

Film sound: Learning space dedicated to the Art of Film Sound Design
A website devoted to the sound of film. Includes a huge array of topics and informative pages on animated sound techniques, sound clichés, film sound history, recent film sound theory, and publications.

California Council for the Humanities
A website devoted to the sound of film. Includes a huge array of topics and informative pages on animated sound techniques, sound clichés, film sound history, recent film sound theory, and publications.

Center for Social Media
The Center for Social Media, based at American University in Washington, D.C., showcases and analyzes media for public knowledge and action—media made by, for, and with publics to address the problems that they share. They pay particular attention to the evolution of documentary film and video in a digital era. The Center’s website includes many resources on fair use, socially engaged media, and the future of media in the digital age.