The face of Carolina is changing. As large numbers of faculty retire and new faculty representing the spectrum of disciplines join the ranks, the pool of expert sources for reporters will expand. To help reporters get to know our faculty, we will highlight several faculty members each week. Create a file or visit the USC News Web site (http://uscnews.sc.edu) for additional experts and news items.

Meet three USC faculty members in film studies:

Prof. Laura Kissel, associate professor of media arts and film studies in the department of art, is a documentary filmmaker and media artist whose work has been screened at festivals and museums and broadcast in regional markets around the country. Kissel's documentary work explores social and political issues surrounding landscape and land use, the representation of place and history and the use of orphan films. Her recent non-fiction film, "Cabin Field," explores the landscape of a cotton field in Georgia as a site of cultural and social change. She is currently in preproduction for a documentary about media representations of disability, eugenics and the struggle for disability civil rights.

Dr. Dan Streible, an associate professor of film studies and media arts, has expertise in film history, preservation of moving images, early cinema, documentary and "orphan films." His writing appears frequently in journals and books on media studies, and he often speaks at prominent film festivals in the United States and abroad. In 1999, he organized the first Orphan Film Symposium at USC. This ongoing, international gathering of scholars, archivists and filmmakers is dedicated to saving, screening and studying all manner of neglected motion pictures so that their cultural and historical value will not be lost. The next "Orphans" gathering will be March 22 - 25, 2006.

Dr. Susan Courtney, an associate professor of film studies in the English department, teaches courses in American cinema, film theory, studies on race and gender, and film genre. She has recently finished a book, "Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967"(Princeton), about the impact of dominant fantasies of interracial sex on the form and the content of American cinema and, in turn, on popular conceptions of racial and sexual identity. Courtney is writing a second book on two exceptionally mythic locations in film culture, the West and the South, to address how cinema has helped to shape how we imagine regional identities.

And don't forget these recent USC faculty spotlights ...