Jennifer Alpert

Jennifer Alpert is a Provostial Fellow and Research Scholar in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. Her work examines 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 Latin American and Latinx film (primarily post-dictatorship Argentina), representations race and gender in cinemas of the Americas, 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, 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 was an advisor for the UCLA Film and T.V. Archive’s global cinema project Science Fiction Against the Margins and 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 that support the success of minoritized groups (particularly FGLI) 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.