Rate My Professor Stephen Charbonneau

Stephen Charbonneau is a Professor in the School of Communication & Multimedia Studies within the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University. He holds a Ph.D. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, an M.A. in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick, and a B.A. in Cinema Studies and Politics from New York University. Charbonneau joined Florida Atlantic University in Fall 2007, where he teaches film and media studies with a main emphasis in documentary film and theory. He has served as Associate Director of the School of Communication & Multimedia Studies since 2015 and as Graduate Program Coordinator. His research specialization is the history and theory of documentary media, focusing on postwar documentary practices approached through participation, collaboration, everyday life, and social change. Additional interests include digital documentary practices, evidentiary video during political events, historic newsfilm covering civil rights movements, and archival digitization inequities.

Charbonneau authored Projecting Race: Postwar America, Civil Rights, and Documentary Film, published by Wallflower/Columbia University Press in 2016, with research supported by a Fulbright Fellowship in 2012-2013, funding from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, and the International Council for Canadian Studies. He co-edited InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader with Chris Robé, published by Indiana University Press in 2020. He also co-edited issue no. 45 of Screening the Past in 2020 on Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), contributing the introduction “The Afterlives of Medium Cool” and the article “We Have a Visitor: Boundary-Crossings and White Allyship in Haskell Wexler’s The Bus and Medium Cool.” Other key publications include “Insurgent Leisure, Aquatic Angst: Newsfilm, Civil Rights and the Coastal Imaginary” in the Journal of e-Media Studies (2022), “Searching for a Digital Documentary Vernacular: Floridian Lives, Possibility Spaces, and the Labless Lab” (forthcoming), and “Playing Confession: Gaming, Autobiography, and the Elusive Self” in I Confess: Constructing the Sexual Self in the Internet Age (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). He has cultivated an undergraduate research cluster in digital documentary practices and is currently developing the book project Archival Tides: Civil Rights, Digital Newsfilm, and Fugitive Imaginaries.