Media Climates: An Introduction

James Leo Cahill is Director of the Cinema Studies Institute and Associate Professor of Cinema and French at the University of Toronto. He is author of Zoological Surrealism: The Nonhuman Cinema of Jean Painlevé (Minnesota, 2019), co-editor with Luca Caminati of Cinema of Exploration: Essays in an Adventurous Film Practice (AFI/Routledge, 2021), and general editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture.

Brian R. Jacobson is Professor of Visual Culture at the California Institute of Technology. He is the author of Studios Before the System: Architecture, Technology, and the Emergence of Cinematic Space (Columbia University Press, 2015), editor of In the Studio: Visual Creation and Its Material Environments (University of California Press, 2020), and recipient of the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Award for Best Edited Collection.

Weihong Bao is Associate Professor of Film and Media & East Asian Languages and Cultures, UC Berkeley. She is the author of Fiery Films: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915–1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), which received honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize in 2016. She is currently working on a new book, Background Matters: The Art of Environment in Modern China. She is the editor-in-chief for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and co-edits the Film Theory in Media History book series published by Amsterdam University Press.