A University of Iowa faculty member in the Cinema and Comparative Literature Department received the 2014 Katherine Singer Kovác’s Award for an Outstanding Essay.

Paula Amad’s piece “Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory’s Gift to Film Studies” analyzed the practice of actors looking directly into the camera, also known as the “return-of-the-gaze,” in postcolonial and visual studies. The essay was published in the Cinema Journal last year.

Amad joined the UI faculty in 2004. She will receive the award at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ annual conference on March 21.

— by Stacey Murray