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About Annie Berke

I am the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, January 2022). My work on subjects ranging from women in comedy to contemporary documentary have been published in outlets including Senses of Cinema, Literary Hub, Ms., and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television. In 2016, I earned my PhD in American Studies and Film & Media Studies from Yale University, and from 2016 to 2019, taught Film Studies at Hollins University. As a graduate student and a professor, I organized conference proceedings, served on post-screening panels, and delivered lectures geared to an undergraduate audience.

Annie Berke is the Film Editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and author of Their Own Best Creations: Women Writers in Postwar Television (University of California Press, 2022). Her scholarship and criticism has been published in Feminist Media Histories, Public Books, Literary Hub, and Ms.

Annie's website

NBN Episodes hosted by Annie:

Higher Education April 26, 2023

Feminists Reclaim Mentorship

An Anthology

Nancy K. Miller, Tahneer Oksman, and Elizabeth Alsop

Hosted by Annie Berke
Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives-- sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can …
Film March 4, 2023

The New Cinephilia

Girish Shambu

Hosted by Annie Berke
Cinephilia has recently experienced a powerful resurgence, one enabled by new media technologies of the digital revolution. One strong continuity between today's "new cinephilia" and the classical cinephilia of the …
Film December 4, 2022

Comedy Against Work

Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times

Madeline Lane-McKinley

Hosted by Annie Berke
Comedy is so frequently the topic of cultural dialogue, but it is rarely taken seriously as an object of study. Comedy Against Work: Utopian Longing in Dystopian Times (Common Notions …
Film October 4, 2022

Cinema’s First Nasty Women

A Discussion with Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi

Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, and Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi

Hosted by Annie Berke
What makes a nasty woman? Is it her unwillingness to break to the stringent standards of patriarchy, her gameness to get rough, even abject? Or is it the way she …
Film August 8, 2022

Hollywood Sports Movies and the American Dream

Grant Wiedenfeld

Hosted by Annie Berke
Through the heart of Hollywood cinema runs a surprising current of progressive politics. Sports movies, a genre that has flourished since the mid-seventies, evoke the American dream and represent the …
Film July 4, 2022

The Earth Dies Streaming

Film Writing, 2002-2018

A. S. Hamrah

Hosted by Annie Berke
The Earth Dies Streaming: Film Writing, 2002-2018 (N+1 Books, 2018) collects the best of A. S. Hamrah’s film writing for n+1, The Baffler, Bookforum, Harper’s, and other publications. Acerbic, insightful …
Film June 3, 2022

The Red Years of Cahiers Du Cinéma (1968-1973)

Daniel Fairfax

Hosted by Annie Berke
The uprising which shook France in May 1968 also had a revolutionary effect on the country's most prominent film journal. Under editors Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma …
Film March 30, 2022

Sketch Comedy

Identity, Reflexivity, and American Television

Nick Marx

Hosted by Annie Berke
“Sketch comedy – more than any other television genre – lays bare the process of identity formation, pokes fun at its contradictions, and invites us to debate its terms.” In …
Film March 9, 2022

Camera Man

Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century

Dana Stevens

Hosted by Annie Berke
“Not a whisper. / Never laughter. / Buster, thank you / for disaster.” So wrote graduate student Dana Stevens, who would go on to become Slate’s resident film critic and …
Film February 1, 2022

The Method

How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

Isaac Butler

Hosted by Annie Berke
“When I set out to write this book, I decided to approach it like a biography. After all, the Method had parents, obscure beginnings, fumbling toward its purpose, a spectacular …
Film December 6, 2021

The Stuff of Spectatorship

Material Cultures of Film and Television

Caetlin Benson-Allott

Hosted by Annie Berke
“Made of light and later sound, the film experience cannot be touched, but that does not mean it is immaterial.” So writes Dr. Caetlin Benson-Allott in her third academic monograph …
Film November 3, 2021

Girl Head

Feminism and Film Materiality

Genevieve Yue

Hosted by Annie Berke
The female form has been a fraught site of filmic meaning – of desire and violence, of sex and death – from the very beginnings of cinema. But how …
Film October 7, 2021

Phantom Lady

Hollywood Producer Joan Harrison, the Forgotten Woman Behind Hitchcock

Christina Lane

Hosted by Annie Berke
A platinum beauty with an ugly secret; a tall, dark, and handsome husband with murder in his eyes; starkly lit interiors that may or may not include the silhouette of …