Anna Stenport
Dean, College of Liberal Arts
Anna Stenport
Dean, College of Liberal Arts
Education
BA, MA, Uppsala University (Sweden); Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley
Bio
Anna Westerstahl Stenport is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Professor of Communication at Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, a position she has held since September 2021. In her previous roles as Professor of Global Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology (2016-21), she served as Chair of the School of Modern Languages, Founding co-Director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, and PI for a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center and Foreign Language and Area Studies consortium grant with Georgia State University.
The author/co-author and editor/co-editor of eleven books and volumes, Dr. Stenport is an expert in Arctic and Nordic cinema, media, and cultural studies and has also published on Scandinavian drama and literature; transnational modernism; global popular music, and higher education innovation. Her research has been supported by the Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholarship Program, the American Scandinavian Foundation, the Swedish American Foundation, the European Union Jean Monnet Program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Her teaching includes courses in Global and Environmental Cinema, Global Media and Cultures, and Career Education for the Global 21st Century.
Dr. Stenport has also held positions at the University of Illinois, where she served as Conrad Humanities Scholar, Beckman Fellow, and Professor of Scandinavian Studies, with appointments in Comparative Literature, Gender and Women’s Studies, Global Studies, and Media and Cinema Studies. There she also served as Director of the Campus Office of Undergraduate Research and Director of the European Union Center, a Title VI National Resource Center and a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence. She has been a Visiting Professor and Anna Lindh Fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley; Queen’s University, Canada; and at several institutions in Scandinavia, including the Universities of Gothenburg and Stockholm; the Danish Film Institute; and KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Anna has given hundreds of presentations about her research and academic interests, and can be contacted at anna.stenport@rit.edu
A full list of publications can be accessed here.
Select Scholarship
Selected Books and Edited Volumes
New Arctic Cinemas: The Climate Crisis and Media Sovereignty. w/ Scott MacKenzie. University of California Press, forthcoming 2023.
Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere. Co-edited w/Arne Lunde. Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos. Ed. w/ Lilya Kaganovsky and Scott MacKenzie. Indiana University Press, 2019.
August Strindberg and Visual Culture: The Emergence of Optical Modernity in Theater, Text, and Image. Ed. w/ Jonathan Schroeder and Eszter Szalczer. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
Arctic Environmental Modernities: From the Age of Exploration to the Era of the Anthropocene. Ed. w/ Scott MacKenzie and Lill-Ann Körber. Palgrave, 2017.
Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic. Ed. w/ Scott MacKenzie. Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
The International Strindberg: New Critical Essays. Ed. Anna Westerstahl Stenport. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012.
Nordic Film Classics: Director Lukas Moodysson and ‘Show Me Love’. University of Washington Press, 2012.
Locating August Strindberg’s Prose: Modernism, Transnationalism, Setting. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Selected Refereed Journal Articles
“South Korea’s Arctic Policy: Political Motivations for 21st Century Global Engagement.” w/Eunji Kim. Polar Journal 11:1 (2021). 11-21.
“Radical Interdisciplinarity: Science, Technology, and the New Humanities of the 21st Century.” w/ Jenny Strakovsky and Ryan Gemliere. ADFL Bulletin 46:2 (2021). 28-43.
“The Origins of Ethnographic Filmmaking, the Fifth Thule Expedition, and Indigenous Cinema: An Alternative History of the Arctic.” w/ Scott MacKenzie. Visual Anthropology Review 36:1(2020). 137-161.
“Visualizing Climate Change in the Arctic and Beyond: Big Data in the Anthropocene, Multimodal Media Cultures, and the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP).” w/ Scott MacKenzie. Journal of Environmental Media 1:1 (2019). 79-99.
“Polar Bears and Ice: Cultural Connotations of Arctic Environments that Contradict the Science of Climate Change.” w/Richard Vachula. Media, Culture & Society 39:2 (2017). 282-295.
“The Global Politics of Color in the Arctic Landscape: Blackness at the Center of Frederic Edwin Church’s Aurora Borealis (1865) and Nineteenth-Century Limits of Representation” w/ Noelle Belanger. ARTMargins 6:2 (2017): 6-26.
“Contemporary Experimental Feminist Sámi Documentary: The Autobiographical Politics of Liselotte Wajstedt and Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers.” w/ Scott MacKenzie. Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 6.2 (2016): 169-182.
“Arnait: Inuit Women’s Collective Filmmaking, Coalitional Politics, and a Globalized Arctic.” w/Scott MacKenzie. Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 30.3 (2016). 153-163.
“Documentary Filmmaking as Colonialist Propaganda and Cinefeminist Intervention: Mai Zetterling’s Of Seals and Men (1979).” w/ Mariah Larsson. Film History 27:4 (2015). 106-129.
“The Eradication of Memory: Film Adaptations and Algorithms of the Digital”. w/ Garrett Traylor. Cinema Journal 55:1 (2015). 78-94.
Book Chapters
“Madonna on Film: Geopolitics, Globalization, and Gender Politics.” In Mapping the Rockumentary: Images of Sound and Fury. Ed. Gunnar Iversen and Scott MacKenzie. Edinburgh University Press. 2021. 97-112.
“Opening up the Post-War World in Color: 1950s Geopolitics and Spectacular Nordic Colonialism in the Arctic and in Africa.” In Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere. Ed. Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Arne Lunde. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 105-125.
“The Serpent’s Egg: Ingmar Bergman’s Exilic Elsewheres in 1970s New German and New Hollywood Cinema.” w/ Arne Lunde. In Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere. Ed. Anna Westerstahl Stenport and Arne Lunde. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 341-359.
“Tearing Up the Screen: Pia Arke’s Post-Colonial Processes.” w/ Scott MacKenzie. In Process Cinema: Handmade Film in the Digital Age. Eds. Scott MacKenzie and Janine Marchessault. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019. 390-406.
“Women Arctic Explorers: In Front of and Behind the Camera.” w/ Mariah Larsson. In Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos. Eds. Lilya Kaganovsky, Scott MacKenzie, and Anna Westerstahl Stenport. Indiana University Press, 2019. 68-91.
“Nordic Remakes: The North in Hollywood.” In The Companion to Nordic Cinema, eds Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 436-456.
In the News
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February 27, 2023
![Beyond the Ratio poster for RIT celebration for women. Simple line drawings of women's faces.]()
Events planned at RIT to commemorate Women’s History Month
Several organizations at RIT, including the new President’s Commission on Women, are putting together a month of events to celebrate Women’s History Month and women in the RIT community, including panel discussions, one-on-one talks, self-empowerment, music, a trip to Seneca Falls, and more.
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October 13, 2022
![five members of a poetry band posing at the corner of a building.]()
RIT sponsors Radical Reversal performance at Innovation Square on Nov. 3
On Thursday, Nov. 3, RIT’s College of Art and Design, College of Liberal Arts, and School of Individualized Study invites the community to a performance by Radical Reversal, a five-piece experimental poetry band.
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September 9, 2022
![six students sitting around a table with laptops, looking at their professor.]()
College of Liberal Arts introduces Liberal Arts Multidisciplinary Scholars program
The Liberal Arts Multidisciplinary Scholars program, which is being introduced this fall, gives financial support to students in STEM majors who are interested in adding a second major from RIT's College of Liberal Arts.
