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Jennifer Alpert

Social Science Research Scholar, Iberian and Latin American Cultures
IDEAL Provostial Fellow

Jennifer Alpert is a film scholar interested in how cinema and media address and represent marginalized groups, with a focus on human rights in Latin America and its U.S. diaspora. Her research interests include the cinemas of Latin America (primarily post-dictatorship Argentina), race and gender in Hollywood, genre (melodrama, crime, science fiction, musicals), popular animation, colonialism and decolonial visual representation and theory, and migration in film. She received her Ph.D. in Film & Media from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021, and since then has held a faculty appointment at Harvard University in the Committee on Degrees in History & Literature, where she has taught courses in the Latin American and Ethnic Studies tracks and advised undergraduate and graduate theses. She has worked in the Hollywood industry at Pixar Animation Studios and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, aiming to increase Latin American and Latinx representation in popular media. She is an advisor for the UCLA Film and T.V. Archive’s global cinema project Science Fiction Against the Margins. She is also the managing editor of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies Teaching Media Dossier (JCMS), a role for which she earned the Society for Cinema and Media Studies' Distinguished Service Award in 2024. Jennifer is a Mellon Mays mentor and a PUENTE community college mentor, both nationwide programs to support the success of minoritized groups in higher education. She is a proud Latin American immigrant constantly trying to reduce her carbon footprint. When she is not researching, teaching, or mentoring students, you can find her glued to her television.

 

Research Interests

  • Cultural History & Studies

     

  • Film History, Criticism & Theory

     

  • Spanish Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

     

  • Speculative Fiction