The Society for Cinema and Media Studies recently announced the recipients of its 2026 Awards. Among this year’s winners are four women teaching at universities in the United States.
Tupur Chatterjee, assistant professor of communication and Asian studies at Tulane University in New Orleans, won the Best First Book Award for her monograph, Projecting Desire: Media Architectures and Moviegoing in Urban India (NYU Press, 2025).
In her current research, Dr. Chatterjee is investigating the material and affective histories of domestic media technologies in South Asia during the 1970s and 1980s, as well as the politics of representation and platform governance in the contemporary streaming era. A former assistant professor at University College Dublin in Ireland, Dr. Chatterjee holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Delhi in India, a master’s degree in global media and communication from the University of London, and a Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Texas at Austin.
Jennifer Holt, professor and chair of the department of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, won the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award for her latest book, Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data (MIT Press, 2024).
An expert on digital media policy and cloud infrastructures, Dr. Holt has consulted for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and presented research to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C. In addition to Cloud Policy, Dr. Holt is the author of Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980-1996 (Rutgers University Press, 2011) and the co-editor of several other books. A UC Santa Barbara faculty member since 2006, she holds a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism with minors in political science and economics from the University of Illinois, a master’s degree in critical and cultural studies of film and television from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. in critical studies of film, television and digital media from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Kelley Conway, professor of film at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the co-recipient of the Best Edited Collection Award for her book, Global Movie Magazine Networks (University of California Press, 2025). She shares the award with her co-editor, Eric Hoyt, the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Throughout her career, Dr. Conway has conducted extensive research on the history of French film, filmmakers’ creative processes and concrete working conditions, the achievements and constraints of women in the film industry, the relationship between film and other areas, and theoretical and practical issues relating to national and transnational cinema. She is the author of two books: Chanteuse in the City (University of California Press, 2004) and Agnes Varda (University of Illinois Press, 2015). Dr. Conway earned her bachelor’s degree in English from Carleton College in Minnesota, a master’s degree in communication studies and film studies from the University of Iowa, and a Ph.D. in film and television from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Patrice Petro, the Presidential Chair in Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, won the Distinguished Career Achievement Award in honor of her significant, long-term contributions to the field.
At UC Santa Barbara, Dr. Petro serves as the Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, where she leads research, teaching, and public programming about media. Before her current role, she spent three decades on the faculty of the film studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is the author or editor of 14 books, including Uncanny Histories in Film and Media Studies (Rutgers University Press, 2022) and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (Rutgers University Press, 2002). A past president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Dr. Petro earned bachelor’s degrees in history and film studies and a master’s degree in modern European and American history from UC Santa Barbara. She received her Ph.D. in film history and theory from the University of Iowa.