Media and Communication Studies
Jennifer Fleeger
Associate Professor, MCS and Film Studies Coordinator
Jennifer Fleeger joined the Ursinus College faculty in 2013. Her work is primarily an investigation of how film and other visual media represent what the world sounds like. To that end, Sounding American explores the importance of opera and jazz during the conversion to sound in Hollywood and Mismatched Women examines the connection between women who don’t sound like they look and new technologies for recording and visualizing music, from Trilby and the phonograph to Susan Boyle and the internet. She has published articles and reviews in Camera Obscura; Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; Quarterly Review of Film and Video; and Popular Music and Society. She is co-editor of Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relationship and is currently finishing a book on media and childhood.
Jennifer teaches courses on subjects ranging from film theory to horror film to women authors to documentary ethics. In her spare time, Jennifer plays the violin in local community orchestras and enjoys making art with her children.
Department
Degrees
- B.A, Macalester College
- M.A., PhD., Univ. of Iowa
Teaching
- Women Directors
- Horror Film
- Documentary Film Ethics
- Film History
- Introduction to Film Studies
- Voice in Media
- Media and Childhood
- Film Theory
Research Interests
Hollywood Cinema
Film Music
Sound Studies
Film Theory
Media Technology
Scandinavian Cinema
Recent Work
Books:
- Sounding American: Hollywood, Opera, and Jazz. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
- Mismatched Women: The Siren’s Song Through the Machine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Co-Edited Collection:
- Media Ventriloquism: How Audiovisual Technologies Transform the Voice-Body Relationship (with Jaimie Baron and Shannon Wong Lerner). New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
Articles of note:
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“When Robots Speak on Screen: Imagining the Cinemechanical Ideal,” Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, Edited by Katherine Meizel and Nina Eidsheim. Oxford University Press, 2019.
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“The Sound of Slime-ness: Telling Children’s Stories on the Nickelodeon Network,” in The Routledge Companion to Screen Music and Sound, Edited by Miguel Mera, Ron Sadoff, and Ben Winters. New York: Routledge, 2017.
- “Tito Schipa, Italian Film Sound, and Opera’s Legacy on Screen” in Locating the Voice in Film, Edited by Tom Whittaker and Sarah Wright. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
- “Deanna Durbin and the Mismatched Voice.” Camera Obscura, Vol. 27, No. 3, 2012.
- “How to Say Things With Songs: Al Jolson, Vitaphone Technology, and the Rhetoric of Warner Bros. in 1929.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2009.