Jennifer Fay

Jennifer Fay is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor in the Department of Cinema & Media Arts and Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She also holds an appointment in German Studies and serves as Coordinator of the Film Theory and Visual Culture Seminar at Vanderbilt’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. She chaired the Department of English from 2022 to 2025 and previously led the Department of Cinema & Media Arts from 2011 to 2022.

• PhD – Film Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2001

Her research lies at the intersection of transatlantic film and media theory, environmental criticism, and the aesthetics and politics of cinema. She is particularly known for her work on the Anthropocene, exploring how film reflects and shapes humanity’s relationship with climate change and artificial environments. Her scholarship also engages deeply with the philosophies of Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, and James Baldwin, especially in relation to sincerity, thought, and racialized privacy in cinema. Her recent essays extend these themes into contemporary documentary, neoliberal art cinema, and postwar German film culture.

Her publication Inhospitable World: Cinema in the Time of the Anthropocene (2018) has been widely acclaimed, winning multiple honors including a Choice Outstanding Title and the Vanderbilt Chancellor’s Award for Research. Her other major works include Theaters of Occupation (2008) and Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity (2010, co-authored). She has published in leading journals such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, Discourse, and Screen, with recent articles analyzing the cinematic representation of nuclear testing, dream logic in neoliberal cinema, and the philosophical implications of the Anthropocene.

• Choice 'Outstanding Title' by the American Library Association
• Honorable Mention for the 2019 ASLE Ecocritical Book Award
• Shortlisted for the 2019 Best Moving Image Award, Kraszna-Krauz Foundation
• Vanderbilt Chancellor’s Award for Research (2020)

Jennifer Fay has been actively involved in editorial and curatorial work, serving on the editorial board of Film-Philosophy and co-editing the Contemporary Film Directors series at University of Illinois Press (2011–2024). She co-curated the public film series “Wir leben im Anthropozän” in Zurich and has been a Fellow at Cinepoetics: Center for Advanced Film Studies in Berlin. She regularly delivers keynotes at international conferences, including the 2023 International Screen Studies Conference in Glasgow.