Antonia Lant

My research spans the fields of art history, cinema studies, and women’s history. It draws on a range of visual sources, from posters and paintings to fashion and films. Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema, studied the impact of wartime privations on filmmaking, and particularly the role that womanhood played in representing the nation in crisis. Latterly, I have focused my attention on silent cinema, to analyze its innovative aesthetics, its infatuation with things Egyptian, and its opportunities for both women’s work and women’s leisure. In the articles “Haptical Cinema” and “How the Cinema Contracted Egyptomania,” I explained the frequent use of ancient Egyptian tropes in film theory, plots, and design (hieroglyphs, mummies, sphinxes). Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, a hefty edited compendium, assembled women’s written accounts of cinema in order to make clear their impact upon the medium. As a historian with an enduring commitment to the safeguarding of cultural documents, I initiated the department’s youngest degree, the MA Program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, an area in which I continue to teach.

Author, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1991); Editor, The Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writings on the First Fifty Years of Cinema (Verso, 2007). Fulbright Scholar; Junior Research Fellowship, Wolfson College, Oxford; J. P. Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship; Remarque Institute, New York University, Fellowship; Research Fellow, IFK, Vienna; Senior Fellowship, IKKM, Weimar; Cohen Fellowship in the History of Art, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; a National Endowment for the Arts National Service Award; and a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant. Guest Professorships at University of Vienna and Harvard University. Member of the National Film Preservation Board, Library of Congress (2012-2021).  Founding Director, MA in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU.