Faculty Earn Award
Posted on Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens, co-authored by Westminster College English faculty Dr. Elizabeth Ford, professor emerita, and Dr. Deborah Mitchell, associate professor, received an honorable mention for the Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Edited Volume in Women's Studies in 2009. The award was given by the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association (PCA/ACA).
Submissions were judged on quality of research, scholarship, or cinematic presentation; originality; and contribution to popular and American studies scholarship. All awards were given for works published in the previous calendar year.
The Koppelman award is given in honor of the first woman to receive the American Culture Association Governing Board Award for Outstanding Contributions to American Culture Studies in 1998. A feminist literary historian, Koppelman has edited nine books.
Ford and Mitchell's book, published by The University Press of Kentucky, investigates the ways in which films about the lives of queens reproduce history and represent women. Ford and Mitchell follow the evolution of queens on film, noting how the depictions have developed from the 1930s to the present and calling attention to the ways in which films both reflect and dictate the social norms of their eras.
The authors compare historical records of monarchs including Queen Christina of Sweden, Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, and Elizabeth I with the Hollywood versions and offer important biographical details of the actresses who portrayed them.
Ford and Mitchell also co-authored The Makeover in Movies: Before and After in Hollywood Films, 1941-2002. Mitchell is the author of Diane Keaton: Artist and Icon.
Ford, who was with Westminster for 16 years, earned undergraduate and master's degrees from Youngstown State University and a Ph.D. from Kent State University.
Mitchell, who has been with Westminster since 1992, earned undergraduate and master's degrees from Youngstown State University and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University.
Contact Mitchell at (724) 946-7030 or e-mail dmitchel@westminster.edu for additional information.
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