Shawn VanCour joins the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies as new Cinema Studies/MIAP Assistant Professor
On behalf of Department Chair, Dana Polan, we are delighted to announce that Shawn VanCour will be joining the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies as an assistant professor, starting in fall 2025. Shawn holds a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied the history and politics of 20th and 21st century screen and sound technologies.
He comes to NYU from UCLA, where he held an appointment in Cinema & Media Studies and Media Archival Studies in the Departments of Information Studies and Film, Television & Digital Media. At UCLA, he served as founding director of his school’s Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage, which digitally preserves content for local community organizations through his department’s media preservation lab. Dr. VanCour has published over thirty articles and book chapters on the history and preservation of audiovisual media and is the author of three books –– Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018), Understanding Information Preservation: Technology and Cultural Memory (Polity, under contract), and Making Television Work: Professionalizing Postwar U.S. Television Production (in progress).
He has worked professionally in video production, moving image archiving, and as a project director for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board. He looks forward to working with students across NYU’s MIAP and Cinema Studies MA and PhD programs, and contributing to NYU-based preservation-oriented initiatives. In the fall, he will be teaching the MIAP courses Video Preservation 1 and Introduction to MIAP. For spring, he will teach the MIAP Collection Management course and a Cinema Studies course on sound with a strong emphasis on sound media history.