Vincent Longo

Vincent Longo
Assistant Professor
Location:
213 Sprau Tower, Mail Stop 5318
Mailing address:
School of Communication
Western Michigan University
1903 W Michigan Ave
Kalamazoo MI 49008-5318 USA
Vincent Longo
Education:
  • PhD., Film, Television, and Media, University of Michigan, 2022
  • B.A., Screen Arts and Cultures, University of Michigan, 2014
Certification:
  • Technical Certificate, Film Directing, Motion Picture Institute of Michigan, 2012
Bio:

I am a media historian, maker, and educator whose work combines media production and scholarship through the creation of audiovisual essays, documentary, creative nonfiction, streaming videos, podcasts, online databases, interactive maps, extended/virtual reality. I believe that media scholarship and production can be blurred in ways that not only lead to more visible and engaging outcomes for scholars, but also can facilitate and empower students to create new knowledge and tell new stories.

My scholarship focuses on the formation of media monopolies and histories of movie-going and audience experiences. I study how the Hollywood studios emerged in the 1920s and came to exercise control not just of the film industry, but the wider media landscape, including television, radio, recorded music, and forms of live entertainment like vaudeville and Broadway theater. I also examine how, where, and with whom people watch entertainment—all of which can impact their meanings and experiences as much as the content of what they watch. Along these lines, one of my current book projects focuses on the relationships between Hollywood and vaudeville. This project is based on my dissertation which received the 2022 ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award and a Robert De Niro Endowed Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

I am also currently finishing a multimedia book under contract with University of Michigan Press about the anti-fascist and labor politics of Orson Welles’s unmade adaptation of Heart of Darkness. The born-digital, open-access version of my monograph, Orson Welles’s “The Heart of Darkness”: Film Research, Anti-Nazism, and Representations of Indigenous Peoples (under-contract with University of Michigan Press) uses a dynamic interface to combine new scholarship with digital archives, animations, audiovisual essays, interactive maps, and 3D models to create a comprehensive digital resource on one of the most famous films never made.

I am an award winning educator and producer of educational media, who recently co-won the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ Innovative Pedagogy Award, one of highest teaching awards in cinema and media studies. The pedagogy underpinning my educational media focuses on utilizing media production to engage students and teach media studies topics and methods. I am finishing two large-scale multimedia teaching resources for which I won the teaching award. The Audiovisual Lexicon (under contract with the University of Michigan Press) and VR Citizen Kane (coming soon to Steam and Meta Quest Store).

I also continue to work in commercial film production. I collaborated with filmmaker Mark Cousins to adapt years of research I had done into Orson Welles’s comparatively unknown career as a drawer, doodler, and painter into The Eyes of Orson Welles (2018) directed by Cousins, funded by Turner Classic Movies and the BBC, and executively produced by Michael Moore. The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and won the Golden Eye Documentary - Special Mention award. More recently, I was the associate producer on a feature-length thriller, The Past Comes Knocking (2024), which premiered on Lifetime Movie Network.