Ger Zielinski

Adjunct Professor

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ger-Zielinski

Biography:

Dr. Ger Zielinski lectures on critical media and communication studies in the Creative School, Professional Communication. He received his PhD from McGill University, after which he was awarded a FRQSC postdoctoral research fellowship, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

His primary areas of research include theories of affect, mediated cities, media exhibition practices and festivals, experimental and underground film and digital media art, and LGBT and queer cinemas. “Reflections on Montreal’s Elektra festival, its twentieth edition, and the exhibition of digital media art” (external link) was published in the NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies (Amsterdam University Press) in 2019. In the early part of the pandemic, he wrote “IN-SYNC OR NOT: Reflections on the Proliferation of Online Film Festivals during the COVID-19 Global Pandemic” (external link) for the German scholarly journal Zeitschrift fuer Medienwissenschaft in 2020.

Dr. Zielinski is 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. 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 given many guest lectures and seminars at a variety of universities, such as New York University, Columbia University, Queen’s University, the New School, University of Glasgow, University of London, and Liverpool John Moores University. His 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 grant adjudicator on various merit review committees, including SSHRC and the Flemish Research Foundation in Belgium (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek).

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 an 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.

Moreover, Dr. 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.

Teaching Activities at TMU:

MP-8101 Creative Research Methods (graduate seminar)

CMN-432 Communication in the Engineering Professions

CMN-601 Visual Communication: A Critical Approach

CMN-279 Introduction to Professional Communication (hybrid and online versions)

CMN-450 Participatory Media and Communication

CMN-448 Introduction to Visual Communication

RTA-322 Technology, Identity, and Creativity

NPF-520 Queer Cinemas (external link) (inaugural version in School of Image Arts)

Click for more information on past syllabi (external link) .

Current Research Activities (select):

PI, SSHRC IDG “Buffering Online and Off”