Held by Meredith C. Ward
MEREDITH C. WARD, Ph.D., is the Director of the Film and Media Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. A cultural historian working at the intersection of cultural beliefs regarding the senses and models of mind, and their interactions with audio-visual media, she is the winner of the 2016 Dissertation Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the author of Static in the System: Noise and the Soundscape of American Cinema Culture, published in 2019 by University of California Press. That book was a finalist for the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in the Field of Media Ecology. Her work has been published in various publications, including Nineteenth Century Film and Literature, Music and the Moving Image, Sound Effects, the Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening, and The Oxford Handbook of Media and Vocality, among other publications.
She is currently at work on a book on representations of female genius in twenty-first century television and film, and a secondary project on media and the COVID-19 pandemic. She is the founder/designer of Studio North, JHU’s student-run film production company that funds prestigious student projects, which has funded twenty-three projects and celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024.
She is a multi-time finalist for JHU’s Excellence in Teaching Awards, and won the Undergraduate Advising Award in 2020. She was also a second-round contestant for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies international Innovative Pedagogy Award for 2020 for her work in creating the Visiting Artist Series, a two-year project that brought New York and Los Angeles-based creatives from the industry to work with JHU and Baltimore School for the Arts Students, as well as creating public-facing programming for the Baltimore community.
For the past three years, she has served as Dean’s Fellow for Undergraduate Mentorship for the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, working to build out models of mentorship for Krieger’s various academic programs and departments.