About
Caryl Flinn joined SAC in Winter 2012. She is the author of Strains of Utopia: Nostalgia, Gender, and Hollywood Film Music (Princeton, 1992); The New German Cinema: Music, History, and the Matter of Style (California, 2003); and most recently, Brass Diva: The Life and Legends of Ethel Merman (California, 2007). She is also co-editor of Music and Cinema (Wesleyan, 2000). Professor Flinn's primary research and teaching areas are in film music and sound, cinema theory (esp. feminist theory and cultural studies), and camp and kitsch aesthetics.
Her current projects include a monograph on The Sound of Music for the BFI's "Film Classics" series and a larger study on the emotional dimensions of musicals. Her work has been published in a variety of anthologies and journals. Her most recent have appeared in Immediacy and Non-Simultaneity: Utopia and Sound, eds. D. Diederichsen and C. Ruhm; Music in the Western, ed. K. Kalinak; and Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination, ed T. Forrest.
Professor Flinn has published three articles in Winter 2013: "A Tale of Two Cowgirls: Songs, Western Novelty Acts, and 1950s Hollywood" in Music in the Western (Routledge), ed. K. Kalinak, which discusses western film musicals ANNIE GET YOUR GUN and CALAMITY JANE; "Repetition in Fassbinder's Queer 'Monomusical,'" focuses on music and sexuality in QUERELLE and appeared in A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, ed. B. Peucker (Wiley-Blackwell); and "Undoing Act Five: Histories, Bodies, and Operatic Remains in Kluge's The Power of Emotion" appeared in T. Forrest's anthology Alexander Kluge: Raw Materials for the Imagination (Amsterdam UP). The last was reprinted from Prof. Flinn's 2004 The New German Cinema (U California).
In addition, Professor Flinn gave several local talks over the Winter 2012 term. In March, she spoke on repetition and film music at the Interdisciplinary Music Forum; in April, she ran a discussion on the work of Alexander Kluge for the Media and Experience SAC/COM Colloquium; and in February, at the First annual Critical Michigan Alliance for Screen Studies, she presented an informal talk on "Film Music and National Identity." This summer she will deliver a paper on yodeling in film at the Music and the Moving Image Conference at NYU.
