This week, visiting professor Peter Porter delivered a guest lecture to students on the MPD MA titled “Display, Gender & Species in Blackfish.” The lecture came ahead of his “Teaching animal movies” seminar presented by the Centre for Animal Ethics, also on UPF’s Poblenou campus. The guest lecture provided students with a foundation of perspectives used in his field, a theoretical review of human beings’ fascination with displaying and watching non-human animals, an overview of his research on “screen animals,” and an in-depth analysis of the 2013 Blackfish documentary, which MA students watched last week as part of their Critical Animal and Media Studies course. The class concluded with a Q&A session led by Department of Communication PhD candidate Laura Fernández Aguilera (also a graduate of the MPD program), who asked Porter questions current students had submitted after their viewing of the film.

Porter teaches Film Criticism and Screenwriting and is Chair of Theatre and Film, as well as General Manager of KEWU-FM, at Eastern Washington University in the United States. He is spending the 2017-18 academic year at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands where he continues his studies of media representations of non-human animals from a cognitive-ethical perspective, as well as his work as Film Review Editor for international human-animal studies journal Society & Animals.

Thanks so much for joining us, Professor Porter!