Seth Fein
Seth Fein's work studies international and transnational histories, much of it focused on audiovisual culture in the Americas. It has moved from the page to the screen. In 2014-2015 he is a Fellow in Multimedia History at Harvard's Charles Warren Center, where he will develop Our Neighborhood, a documentary that examines Washington's intervention in Latin American television as cultural counterinsurgency against the Cuban Revolution across the 1960s; he has published an essay from this research – “Entre Nuestro Barrio y Un pueblo en vilo" – which also generated insights about the Bush administration's use of television in the Middle East. In 2014 he completed a video installation – outerspace innerborough unisphere@50 – which transhistoricizes the tension between international ideology and transnational sociality as evoked by this New York icon over the last half century. He currently is completing a documentary about innerborough radio-controlled car subculture in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens.
Fein has written widely on crossborder film culture in the Americas. His book – Transnational Projections: The United States in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema – will be published by Duke. His other publications include: "Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications" in In From the Cold: (2008); "Proyectando la relación especial: México-Estados Unidos durante la Guerra Fría" in ¿Somos especiales? (2006); "New Empire into Old: Making Mexican Newsreels the Cold War Way," Diplomatic History 28.5 (2004); “Culture across Borders in the Americas,” History Compass 1.1 (2003); and chapters in Culture and International History (2003), Fragments of a Golden Age (2001), Visible Nations (2000), Mexico's Cinema (1999), Close Encounters of Empire (1998), Horizontes del segundo siglo (1998), México-Estados Unidos, encuentros y desencuentros en el cine (1996); and articles in Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 17, Objeto Visual 7, Nuevo Texto Crítico 10.21, Film-Historia 4.2, Secuencia 34, Historia y grafía 4. Among the grants that have supported his research are awards from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Fein was a professor US-World Relations (2002-2010) at Yale, where among his awards were the university's Graduate Mentor Prize, its Poorvu Prize for Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Instruction, and a McCredie Fellowship for Innovation in Instructional Technology. From 2011-2013 he was Graduate Director of Columbia's Institute of Latin American Studies and a visiting professor of history at Barnard, where his courses included Projecting American Empire on Film and the Idea of the Western Hemisphere.
