Julie Turnock

Julie Turnock
Professor of Media & Cinema Studies; Director of the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies
243 Gregory Hall
Education
  • Ph.D., Media and Cinema Studies, University of Chicago, 2008
  • M.A., Film and Television, University of Amsterdam, 2001
  • M.A., Art History, Indiana University, 1998
  • B.S., Modern Languages, Georgetown University, 1993
Affiliations
  • Professor of Media and Cinema Studies
  • Director, Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies
  • Coordinator for Film Studies 
  • 0% Appointment in Comparative Literature 
  • 0% Appointment in English 
  • 0% Appointment in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
Course Specialties
  • Survey of World Cinema I and II 
  • Film Theory and Criticism (graduate and undergraduate) 
  • Special Effects: History and Aesthetics 
  • History of Film Criticism 
  • Historiography of Cinema (graduate level) 
  • Digital Cinema 
  • Cinema of the 1970s 
  • Women’s Cinema (graduate level) 
  • Topics in Contemporary Cinema 
  • American Cinema of the 1980s
Awards

2024, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship
2009-2010, Andrew W. Mellon/ACLS Early Career Fellowship, Recent Doctoral Recipients, Davis Institute of the Humanities, University of California, Davis 

Research/Creative Endeavor

Books:

The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism (University of Texas Press, 2022). 

Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2015). 

Selected Articles: 

“Jurassic Park’s Smoothing Pass: The Dinosaur Input Device and Digital Materialism,” The Jurassic Park Book: New Perspectives on the Classic 1990s Blockbuster," Matt Melia ed. (Bloomsbury Academic Press, November 2023.)

“The Auteurist Special Effects Film: Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and the ‘Single-Generation Look.’” In The Hollywood Renaissance: Revisiting American Cinema's Most Celebrated Era, Peter Krämer and Yannis Tzioumakis eds. (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2018): 71-90. 

“Special Effects: Auteur Renaissance, 1968-1980” and “Special Effects: Post-War Hollywood, 1947-1967” in Editing and Special Visual Effects: Behind the Silver Screen, volume eds. Charles Keil and Kristen Whissel, series ed. Jon Lewis (Rutgers University Press/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 2016): 116-128. 

"Patient Research on the Slapstick Lots: From Trick Men to Special Effects Artists in Silent Hollywood,” Early Popular Visual Culture 13:2 (2015): 152-173. 

"’The True Stars of Star Wars?’: Experimental Filmmakers the in 1970s and 1980s Special Effects Industry.” Film History 26.4 (2014): 120-145. 

“Removing the Pane of Glass: The Hobbit, 3D High Frame Rate Filmmaking, and the Rhetoric of Cinematic Realism,” Film Criticism (Spring/Summer 2013): 30-59. 

“The ILM Version: Recent Digital Effects and the Aesthetics of 1970s Cinematography” Film History 24:2 (2012): 158-168. 

“The Screen on the Set: The Problem of Classical Studio Rear Projection,” Cinema Journal 51.2 (Winter, February 2012): 157-162.