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The fifth Faculty Pub Night of the 2024-25 season features Gloria Shin, instructor in Film, TV and Media Studies (School of Film and Television). She will discuss her recent book, "Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire."

About Faculty Pub Night

Students, staff, faculty, alumni, and members of the public are all invited to the 2024-25 series of Faculty Pub Night at the William H. Hannon Library. Eight LMU professors are selected annually to discuss their latest publication or project in a comfortable setting and format that welcomes diverse perspectives for an inclusive conversation aimed to educate the entire community. All Faculty Pub Nights are free and open to the public.

About the Author's Work

In her groundbreaking book "Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire" (Lexington Books, 2023), the first major critical study of Elizabeth Taylor’s images and work, Gloria Shin unpacks Elizabeth Taylor’s iconicity that had been previously entrenched and overly dominated by camp readings to argue how she is fundamentally tied to projections of American power in the world during the days of the civil rights movement, postcolonialism and the Cold War. Her staggering beauty, performative abilities, and charisma made her an unequivocal star and an affective genius whose films, offscreen adventures, and activism helped form a collective American imaginary tied to fantasies of white identity during the dynamic decades of the 1950s to the 1980s. Taylor emerges as a cognitive map on which to imagine the vast possibilities open to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure and even political agency that allows her stardom to be symbolic of American empire at the height of its power.

About the Author

Gloria Shin has been teaching in the Department of Film, TV and Media Studies in the School of Film and Television for ten years. She has designed and taught courses on American independent film, Asian cinemas and film auteurship for both undergraduate and graduate students. As an expert in stardom and celebrity culture, she argues that stars are not only charismatic performers and fascinating ideological texts onto themselves but figures who are exemplary models of identity in practice. Furthermore, she asserts that beautiful women stars are members of an elite professional labor class whose formidable looks are at the center of a globalized visual culture that precedes and will succeed cinema itself, while tying together evolving fantasies of gender, exceptionalism and visual pleasure in the service of numerous ideologies.

About the William H. Hannon Library

The William H. Hannon Library fosters excellence in academic achievement through an array of distinctive services that enable learners to feed their curiosity, experience new worlds, develop their ideas, inform their decision-making, and inspire others. More information can be found at http://library.lmu.edu

For more information about this event, contact the Outreach and Engagement team at the William H. Hannon library via email at library.outreach@lmu.edu or call 310-338-5234.