Joshua Yumibe
Professor of Film Studies
Office: C639 Wells Hall
Email: yumibe@msu.edu
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2007
Joshua Yumibe’s research focuses on the aesthetic and technological history of cinema. Other areas of interest include avant-garde and experimental cinemas, nineteenth and early twentieth century visual culture, Frankfurt school theory, and archival theories and practices.
He is the author of Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 2012), which received honorable mention for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies first book award. He is co-author of Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), with Giovanna Fossati, Tom Gunning, and Jonathon Rosen, and foreword by Martin Scorsese. The book was shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. With Sarah Street (University of Bristol), Yumibe is also co-author of Chromatic Modernity: Color, Cinema, and Media of the 1920s (Columbia University Press, 2019), which was supported by the Leverhulme Trust and won the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award .
Since 2003, Yumibe has been collaborating with Paolo Cherchi Usai on the archival collection, Davide Turconi Project. In 2011, they launched the project online to provide access to the collection as part of the 30th anniversary of the Giornate del Cinema. In 2018, Yumibe curated the related exhibit “Dreaming in Color: The Davide Turconi Collection of Early Cinema” at the George Eastman Museum.
In 2016, he was a recipient of the Michigan State University Teacher-Scholar Award, which is granted to faculty who early in their careers have earned the respect of students and colleagues for their devotion to and skill in teaching, and whose instruction is linked to and informed by their research and creative activities.
From 2013 to 2021, he served as the Director of the Film Studies Program at Michigan State University. He has also served on the executive committee of Domitor, the International Society of the Study of Early Cinema (2011–2018) and was the vice-president of the organization from 2016–2018. Receiving his PhD in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago in 2007, he was previously an assistant professor at Oakland University and a lecturer at the University of St Andrews.
Yumibe is Japanese American; his late grandparents met and were married at the Tule Lake internment camp during World War II.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
Guest editor with Elena Gipponi, Cinéma&Cie, 19, no. 32, Special Issue: Cinema and Mid-Century Colour Culture (2019).
The Colour Fantastic: Chromatic Worlds of Silent Cinema, co-edited Giovanna Fossati, Vicky Jackson, Bregt Lameris, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi, Sarah Street, and Joshua Yumibe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018).
The Image in Early Cinema: Form and Material, co-edited Scott Curtis, Philippe Gauthier, Tom Gunning, and Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).
Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema, co-authored with Tom Gunning, Giovanna Fossati, Jonathon Rosen, and Joshua Yumibe; foreword by Martin Scorsese (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). Shortlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award, 2016.
Guest editor, The Moving Image 15, no. 1, Special Issue: Restoring Color (2015).
Performing New Media: 1890–1915, co-edited Kaveh Askari, Scott Curtis, Frank Gray, Louis Pelletier, Tami Williams, Joshua Yumibe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
Moving Color: Early Film, Mass Culture, Modernism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Honorable Mention for the SCMS First Book Award, 2013.
“Chariots of Fire Re-run: Locating Film’s Cultural Capital in a Post-Industrial Age,” co-authored with Tom Rice, British Journal of Cinema and Television 12.3 (2015): 321–341.
“From Nitrate to Digital Archive: The Davide Turconi Project,” co-authored with Alicia Fletcher, The Moving Image 13.1 (April 2013): 1–32.
“Visual Diplomacy: Projections of Power from the Field in Ethiopia,” Early Popular Visual Culture 9.4 (November 2011): 309-323. Shortlisted for the British Association of Film, Television, and Screen Studies’ Best Article in a Refereed Journal Award, 2011–2012.
See all publications.
RECENT COURSES:
Cinema and the Archive
Classical Film and Media Theory
Color Cinema
History of Film to Midcentury
Interwar Modernism in Film and Media
Modernism and Modernity in Film
Wong Kar-wai and Global Art Cinemas