We are pleased to announce the election of Michael B. Gillespie, currently Associate Professor of Film at the City College, CUNY, to the Doctoral Faculty in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, effective immediately. Dr. Michael B. Gillespie is a film theorist and historian who specializes in black visual studies, film theory, global cinema, and contemporary art, among other disciplines.

Dr. Gillespie has published extensively and his recent publications include “Grace and Grind: Notes on the Work of Kevin Jerome Everson” in How to Remain Human (Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, 2015) and “Reckless Eyeballing: Coonskin, Film Blackness, and the Racial Grotesque,” in Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies. ed. Mia Mask (Routledge, 2012). His recent book, titled Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film, was released by Duke University Press in 2016. In this well-received scholarly contribution to black studies, Gillespie frames black film as an interdisciplinary form and reads against contemporary art, literature, and music to illustrate how film can be understood to enact black visual and expressive culture more broadly.

In addition to his extensive record of scholarly contributions, Gillespie has participated in over thirty academic conferences on interdisciplinary subjects both nationally and internationally. A committed teacher, Michael Gillespie has taught at City College since 2015 and has previously held an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Film at Ohio University, Athens. In Fall 2016, he was a visiting Professor at Princeton University. Additionally, Gillespie has taught and lectured at The New School, Duke University, and New York University. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Department of Cinema Studies, New York University and a B.A. in English from Morehouse College, Atlanta.

The election of Dr. Gillespie to the Doctoral Faculty in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY reflects the Program’s long-standing commitment to studying modern and contemporary art. It also illustrates the Program’s leading position in that field, with fifteen faculty members whose areas of specialization range from the late nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries art and visual culture in the global context.

Founded in 1971, the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the Graduate Center is dedicated to the development of scholars, teachers, museum curators, art critics, and other arts professionals. The program provides students with a general background in the history of art to prepare them to serve their discipline and their communities in all areas of cultural endeavor. Since the first degree was awarded in 1978, the Graduate Center has produced a robust network of over 330 art history alumni, many of whom hold senior positions at research universities, museums, and cultural institutions across the country and abroad.