"Hooray for Hollywood: American Cinema Conquers the World"
1. Date: Wednesday, November 11, 2026
2. Time: 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM
2. Venue: Academic Building C103
3. Speaker: Prof. Steffen Hantke (Sogang University)
About the Speaker:
Steffen Hantke has edited Caligari’s Heirs: The German Cinema of Fear after 1945 (2007), American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium (2010), and, with Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet, War Gothic in Literature and Culture (2016). He is author of Monsters in the Machine: Science Fiction Film and the Militarization of America after World War II (2016) and Cloverfield: Creatures and Catastrophes in Post-9/11 Cinema (2023). He teaches in the American Culture Program at Sogang University in Seoul.
About the Seminar:
For the better part of a century, Hollywood has taught audiences around the world how to be cool, funny, or heroic, how to fight or sing and dance or how to fall in love. Long before visitors ever set foot in the U.S., many of them already know all about the country and its people from what they have seen in movies. There is a global audience which is deeply familiar with the stars, the characters, and the heroes and villains of American cinema. But is the goal of this global reach simply to illustrate and educate, or is it to project U.S. power around the world by other means? Together, we will think about what it means to watch American films in a global context, to study and understand them, and to love--or maybe even to resist?--the power of Hollywood.