The Sound of Music

Caryl Flinn is a professor of Film, Television and Media, and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of the 2015 BFI Film Classics volume on The Sound of Music. Flinn’s scholarly interests include film music, film musicals, and the concepts of kitsch and camp. Her work explores different functions of film music and is especially interested in its social ideological functions over different historical periods. Her first book, Strains of Utopia, examined Hollywood’s studio days, and her second, New German Cinema: Music, History and the Matter of Style, addressed postwar Germany, where music enjoyed an active role in exploring the country’s difficult relationship with its past and its quest for renewed identity. She has also published a biography of Ethel Merman: Brass Diva. She is the recipient of grants from SSHRC and DAAD, and has also been Scholar in Residence at the Museum of the City of New York.

Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of twelve books, including The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), Teaching Film(2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest U.S. professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.