Biography:
Dr. Ger Zielinski lectures on critical media and communication studies in the Creative School, Professional Communication. He received his PhD from McGill University, after which he was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
His primary areas of research include theories of affect and aesthetics, cultural theory, mediated cities and the representation of urban space, media exhibition practices and festivals, experimental and underground film and digital media art, and LGBT and queer cinemas. “Reflections on Montreal’s Elektra festival, its twentieth edition, and the exhibition of digital media art” (external link) was published in the NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (Amsterdam University Press) in 2019. In the early part of the pandemic, he wrote “IN-SYNC OR NOT: Reflections on the Proliferation of Online Film Festivals during the COVID-19 Global Pandemic” (external link) for the German scholarly journal Zeitschrift fuer Medienwissenschaft in 2020.
Dr. Zielinski is the principal investigator of his research project on streaming cultures and online festivals, funded by a multi-year SSHRC Insight Development Grant. He has been a visiting researcher or scholar at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie in the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Innis College at the University of Toronto. He has given many guest lectures and seminars at a variety of universities, such as New York University, Columbia University, Queen’s University, the New School, University of Glasgow, and University of London. His research projects have received financial support from several funding agencies, including the Beaverbrook Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Fonds de recherche du Québec, Société et culture (FRQSC), Canada Council of the Arts, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Centre de recherche sur l'intermédialité (CRI), Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), among others.
For several years he served as a film programmer/curator with the nomadic artists’ film and video exhibition group Pleasure Dome and independently. He also worked as an editor for Alphabet City (MIT Press), and, as a film and media arts writer, he contributes to a handful of art and film magazines, including Cineaste and Afterimage (University of California Press). He is currently researching and writing a monograph on the early work of queer activist-filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim for the Queer Film Classics series at McGill–Queen's University Press.
Moreover, Dr. Zielinski is an avid cyclist, who just following his undergraduate studies made a particularly errant journey from Vancouver Island, into the Rockies, up the Okanagan Valley, across the Prairies, and back to Toronto in just under two months on his trusty hybrid 12-speed.
Dr. Zielinski is teaching sections of the large lecture course CMN-601 Visual Communication: A Critical Approach, the lecture/workshop CMN-450 Participatory Media and Communication, and CMN-279 Introduction to Professional Communication (both hybrid and virtual versions). For more information on his research projects, publications, and past syllabi, see https://mcgill.academia.edu/GerZielinski (external link)