Roger Hallas

Roger Hallas
Associate Professor
CONTACT
English
433 Hall of Languages
Email: rhallas@syr.edu
Office: 315.443.4947
A&S AFFILIATIONS
Women's and Gender Studies
PROGRAM AFFILIATIONS
LGBTQ Studies
South Asian Studies
Social/Academic Links
Recent Courses
English Undergraduate:
ENG154 Interpretation of Film
ENG171 World Cinema
ENG340 Cinema and the Documentary Idea
ENG352 Contemporary British Film
ENG360 Queering Documentary
English Graduate:
ENG630 World Cinema
ENG730 Writing and Filming Photography
ENG730 Visual Cultures of Witnessing
LGBT Studies Undergraduate:
QSX111 Queer Histories, Communities and Politics
QSX112 Sexualities, Genders, Bodies
After completing a BA in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, Roger Hallas came stateside to pursue graduate studies at New York University, where he got his MA and PhD in Cinema Studies. He specializes in documentary media, LGBTQ studies, and photography studies.
His first two books examined how visual culture performs mediated acts of bearing witness to historical trauma. The first book, The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory, and Visual Culture (Wallflower/Columbia University Press, 2007), which he co-edited with Frances Guerin, analyzes how different visual media inscribe acts of witnessing and how the image itself can serve as witness to historical trauma. The second book, Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Duke UP, 2009), illuminates the capacities of queer film and video to bear witness to the cultural, political, and psychological imperatives of the AIDS crisis. His two subsequent books have explored the intermediality between documentary film and other media/arts. His edited collection Documenting the Visual Arts (Routledge, 2020) investigates the contemporary art documentary and his forthcoming book A Medium Seen Otherwise: Photography in Documentary Film (Oxford University Press, 2023) elucidates how the incorporation of photography in documentary film opens up new perspectives on both media.
Hallas teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in documentary media, world cinema, visual culture, and LGBTQ studies. In 2011, He was a Judith Greenberg Seinfeld Distinguished Faculty Fellow and in 2016 he was awarded a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship. With Professor Tula Goenka (Newhouse), he co-directs the Syracuse University Human Rights Film Festival held annually in September.
- Film studies
- Documentary studies
- Photography studies
- Visual culture
- LGBT studies
- Trauma studies
- Experimental film and video
(Sept. 18, 2018)
A Q&A with Syracuse Symposium participants Tere Paniagua, Roger Hallas, Tula Goenka
(Sept. 14, 2018)
Syracuse Symposium Continues "Stories" Theme with 16th annual SUHRFF
(April 25, 2017)
Humanities Center fellowships underscore University commitment to high-impact research
(Nov. 17, 2016)
Hallas to use grant to complete book exploring the intersection between photography and a documentary film
(Oct. 1, 2015)
New program convener Roger Hallas builds on momentum generated by founder Steven Cohan