Jane M. Gaines is Professor Emerita of Literature and English, Duke University and currently Professor of Film, Columbia University. She is the author of three books, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry? (University of Illinois, 2018), Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (North Carolina, 1991), and Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, 2001). In 2018, Prof. Gaines received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Distinguished Career Award and in 2023, an Honorary doctorate from University of Stockholm. A founder of the Visible Evidence conference on documentary, she continues to publish on documentary activism, intellectual property in the internet age, the history of piracy, and has critiqued the “historical turn” in film and media studies as “What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?” and “Eisenstein’s Absolutely Wonderful, Totally Impossible Project,” in Sergei M. Eisenstein: Notes for a General History of Cinema. Forthcoming is What Happened?: Documentary Media and the Dilemmas of Historical Time. The online resource, Women Film Pioneers Project, published by the Columbia University Libraries, launched as a pilot project in the future of publishing in 2013: wfpp.columbia.edu.
Books
What Happened?: Documentary Media and the Dilemmas of Historical Time (in progress)
Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industry? (University of Illinois, 2018).
Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era. University of Chicago Press, 2001.
Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (University of North Carolina, 1991).
Online Publications & Interviews (selected)
Editor: In Media Res Special Issue: "Critique of Audiovisual Criticism": January 2026.
- Introduction: "What Do Words Have to Do With Images in the Video Essay?"
- Article: "'The Instant in Which...': What Big Jet TV Live-streaming and TikTok Cat Videos Have in Common."
Nick Baer & Annie van den Oever. "The Historical Turn Backward." Interview with Jane Gaines, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies (Autumn 2025).
"Images of Struggle as Having ‘Lives of Their Own’—Or Not,” “Critique and the Moving Issue” Part II, In Media Res (December 2023).
Interview: Andrew Van Dam, "Films Most Often Assigned in College," Washington Post (September 2022)
"Documentary Theory Can Never Be the Same After George Floyd." Visible Evidence Forum (August 2020).
After the Facts (Karen Pearlman, 2018) Commentary. [in] Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies 6, no. 4 (September 2019): https://intransition.openlibhums.org/article/id/11365/.
"Alice and the Too Many Mattresses," in Jaine Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall'Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019.
“Political Mimesis.” In Eds. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, Collecting Visible Evidence. University of Minnesota Press, 1999. In Spanish translation as “Mimesis politica,” Cine Documental (December, 2017): http://revista.cinedocumental.com.ar
“Ways of Seeing Everything.” Politics/Letters. May 22, 2017. Special John Berger issue
“Wordlessness, To Be Continued…” Researching Women in Silent Cinema: New Findings and Perspectives, Eds. Monica Dall’ Asta and Victoria Duckett. University of Bologna, Italy, 2013, 288 – 302.
Articles in Journals
"Antonia Dickson: The Kineto-Phonograph and the Telephony of the Future." Journal of Early Victorian Popular Culture 21, no. 1 (February 2023).
"Speculative Counterfactuality: What If Antonia Dickson Had Invented the Kinetoscope?" Feminist Media Histories 8, no. 3 (2022): 8–34.
“On Not Narrating the History of Feminism and Film,” Feminist Media Histories 2, no. 2 (2016): 6 – 31.
"What Happened to the Philosophy of Film History?" Film History 25, nos. 1 - 2 (2013): 70 - 80. Reprinted in Chinese translation, Contemporary Cinema no. 260 (November 2017): 129–133.
"The Inevitability of Teleology: From le dispositif to Apparatus Theory to dispositifs Plural," Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 31 nos.1-2-3 (2011): 101 – 114.
"World Women: Still Circulating Silent Era Film Prints." Framework 51 – 2 (Fall 2010): 283- 303.
"Sad Songs of Nitrate" Camera Obscura 22, no. 3-66 ( Fall 2007): 171 – 178.
"Early Cinema’s Heyday of Copying: The Too Many Copies of L’Arroseur arrosé" Cultural Studies Vol. 20, nos. 2 - 3 (May 2006): 227 - 244. Reprinted in Ed. Tilman Baumgaertel, The Pirate Book: Global Media Piracy and Other Inadmissible Approaches Toward Intellectual Property Rights. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming.
"First Fictions." Signs 30, no. 1 (Winter 2005), 1293 - 1317.
"Film History and the Two Presents of Feminist Film Theory" Cinema Journal 44. No. 1 (2004).
"Queering Feminist Film Theory." Jump Cut no. 41 (Spring 1997). Essay review of Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies.
"Women and Representation: Can We Enjoy Alternative Pleasure?" Jump Cut no. 29 (Spring 1984) / Reprinted in American Media and Mass Culture: Left Perspectives. Ed. Don Lazere. University of California Press, 1987; Sexual Stratagems: Issues in Feminist Film Criticism Ed. Patricia Erens (Indiana University Press, 1990).