Rate My Professor Bernard Cook

Bernard Cook serves as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs in Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences and as Founding Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is a core faculty member in both the Film and Media Studies Program and the American Studies Program. Cook earned a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in English from Georgetown University, followed by a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2001. A native of New Orleans, his expertise encompasses film studies, television studies, media history, media industries, documentary media, and social justice. He has developed and taught courses on documentary filmmaking, film studies, social justice, and the American past, emphasizing hands-on student documentary production for community-based learning.

Cook is the author of Flood of Images: Media, Memory, and Hurricane Katrina (University of Texas Press, 2015), an analysis of media coverage and collective memory of the disaster with implications for racial and ecological justice. He edited Thelma & Louise Live!: The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film (University of Texas Press, 2007). Notable publications include "American Film Violence: An Analytic Portrait" (Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2002), "Over My Dead Body: The Ideological Use of Dead Bodies in Network News Coverage of Vietnam" (Quarterly Review of Film & Video, 2001), "Violence and Its Injury Consequences in American Movies: A Public Health Perspective" (Injury Prevention, 2000), and "Producing Audiovisual Knowledge: Documentary Video Production and Student Learning in the American Studies Classroom" (2009). As Founding Chair of the University Core Requirement in Humanities & Culture and a member of the Board of the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, he shapes humanities education and engages in digital and public humanities, including presentations at the National Humanities Conference. Since 2015, Cook has facilitated collaborations between the GU272+ Descendant Community and Georgetown students on reparative justice projects. He is currently producing the documentary series Since Last We Met, featuring I Am The Bridge (2023), which documents stories of descendants of the 272 enslaved people sold by Maryland Jesuits in 1838 to support Georgetown University.