Erica Hillary Stein

Erica Stein is an associate professor of film and member of the urban studies steering committee. She teaches foundational classes on film aesthetics, culture, history, and industry as well as electives and seminars on contemporary auteurs, media and the city, and avant-garde film. Her site-specific intensives use community partnerships to democratize access to alternative cinemas.

Prof. Stein's research addresses the intersections of mediation and urbanization, particularly how capital lays claim to physical and social space through specific visual strategies, and how certain moving images resist those strategies. Her first book, Seeing Symphonically: Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York, was published by SUNY Press (2021). With Brendan Kredell and Germaine Halegoua she edited The Companion to Media and the City (Routledge, 2022). Her research has appeared in Camera Obscura, Journal of Film and Video, The New Review of Film and Television Studies, as well as other journals and edited volumes. She is currently working on her second book, Property/Crime: Real Estate, Infrastructure, and Environment on Screen.

Prof. Stein is the past co-chair of the Urbanism, Geography, and Architecture Scholarly Interest Group. She co-founded Mediapolis: a journal of cities and culture, where she currently serves as treasurer. Mediapolis publishes peer and editorially reviewed short-form, multimedia, and/or collaborative scholarship. It also publishes peer reviewed undergraduate research twice a year.