Dr. Ger Zielinski
Dr. Ger Zielinski lectures on critical media studies in the Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts, and in The Creative School. He received his PhD from McGill University for his pioneering research and dissertation on LGBTQ film festivals. Following his doctoral studies, he was awarded a FRQSC postdoctoral research fellowship for his project that mapped the transnational movement of underground cinema between NYC and West Berlin in the 1970s, tenable at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.
Recently, Zielinski was Principal Investigator of his research project “Buffering Online and Off” on digital streaming cultures and online festivals, funded by a multi-year SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2020-24). He has been a visiting researcher or scholar at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie in the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, and Innis College at the University of Toronto. He has also given many guest lectures and research seminars at universities worldwide, such as New York University, Columbia University, the New School, University of Vienna, University of Glasgow, University of London, and Liverpool John Moores University. Recently, he became a member of the Editorial Advisory Board, “Political Cinemas” book series, Edinburgh University Press. In 2024, he joined the Scientific Committee for Film Festivals: Borders, Identities, Solidarities Symposium, held at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy).
Moreover, Zielinski is an avid cyclist, who just following his undergraduate studies made a particularly errant journey from Vancouver Island, into the Rockies, up the Okanagan Valley, across the Prairies, and back to Toronto in just under two months on his trusty hybrid 12-speed.
Research Interests:
- environmental media studies
- film exhibition practices and festivals
- mediated cities
- LGBT and queer cinemas
- queer space
- experimental and underground film culture
- digital media arts
Select Courses Taught (TMU):
Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts
SOC-482 Advanced Approaches to Media Analysis
SOC-902 Hollywood and Society
SOC-202 Popular Culture
RTA School of Media & MA in Media Production (MMP), The Creative School
MP-8102 Theories in Popular Media Entertainment (graduate seminar)
MP-8101 Creative Research Methods (graduate seminar)
FCD-918/RTA-918/MP-8918 Media Ethics (upper year & graduate)
RTA-322 Technology, Identity, and Creativity
School of Professional Communication, The Creative School
CMN-601 Visual Communication: A Critical Approach
CMN-413 Corporate Communications
CMN-450 Participatory Media and Communication
CMN-448 Introduction to Visual Communication
School of Image Arts, The Creative School
NPF-520 Queer Cinemas (external link) (inaugural version in School of Image Arts)
Follow the link for sample past syllabi (external link) .
For details on a recent research project, see SSHRC IDG “Buffering Online and Off” (2020-24).
Click either of the following links for updates on other projects and publications on ResearchGate (external link) or on Academia.edu (external link) .
Zielinski’s research projects have received financial support from several funding agencies, including the Beaverbrook Foundation, the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Fonds de recherche du Québec, Société et culture (FRQSC), Canada Council of the Arts, Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Centre de recherche sur l'intermédialité (CRI), Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), among others. He has also served as a research grant adjudicator on various merit review committees, including SSHRC and the Flemish Research Foundation in Belgium (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek). Moreover, he is also recipient of the Governor General’s Academic Award.
For several years, he served as a film programmer/curator with the nomadic artists’ film and video exhibition group Pleasure Dome and independently. He also worked as a commissioning editor for Alphabet City (MIT Press), and, as a film and media arts writer, he contributes to a handful of art and film magazines, including Cineaste and Afterimage (University of California Press).
He is currently researching and writing a monograph on the early work of queer activist-filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim for the Queer Film Classics series at McGill–Queen's University Press.