CMSS Research Fellowship Recipient 2024 - Matthew Croombs

Dr. Croombs’ research is situated at the interdisciplinary intersection between documentary aesthetics, media history, and anti-colonial struggles for liberation, with a particular emphasis on the Algerian War of Independence. Previous work on both film and the Algerian War and the legacies of Third World Internationalism has been published in the most prestigious, internationally recognized journals in film and media studies, including: Cinema Journal, Screen, Discourse, Third Text, and The Quarterly Review of Film and Video.

Dr. Croombs’ project for the CMSS Fellowship will expand upon a body of scholarship within film and media studies that is actively retracing the radical “third cinemas” of the anticolonial era in their internationalist dimensions and their resonances with the visual cultures of the contemporary Global South. His case studies include Ahmed Rachedi’s L’Aube des damnés (1965), William Klein’s Festival panafricain d'Alger 1969 (1969), and Santiago Alvarez’s ...Y el cielo fue tomado por asalto (1974).

In offering a rigorous account of how the documentaries under consideration present globespanning models of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial aesthetics, my project will make a significant contribution to the examination of war and cinema and to the politicization of the category of “World Cinema”, a  methodology that seeks to de-center the West and examine film history in its forms of inter-connectedness.

The proposed project significantly expands on Dr. Croombs’ existing scholarship and will take the form of an article for the journal Critical Inquiry.

CMSS is very proud and excited to work with Dr. Croombs this year.