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Åsa Jernudd

Position: Senior Lecturer School/office: School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences

Email:

Phone: +46 19 302129

Room: F3133

Åsa Jernudd

About Åsa Jernudd

Åsa Jernudd is associate professor in Media- and Communication Studies at the School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences. She earned her PhD in Cinema Studies at Stockholm University in 2007.

Jernudd is on the editorial committee for Media History Archives (Mediehistoriskt arkiv, https://mediehistorisktarkiv.se/); she is member of the Swedish Film Institute’s Advisory Committee for Distribution and Exhibition (Rådet för visning och spridning), as well as of the Committee for Cinema Development (Kommittén för biografutveckling) which is commissioned by the national organisation for "small" cinemas, Riksföreningen Biograferna. With Dr. Maria Luna Rassa she is coordinator of HoMER (History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception, https://homernetwork.org/), an international network of researchers interested in understanding the complex phenomena of cinema-going, exhibition, and reception, from a multidisciplinary perspective.  

 

Research

Jernudd’s research is in the field of 'new cinema history' and concerns film exhibition as social and cultural event. Her thesis offered a social history of the first decade of film exhibition in Sweden, tracing how the medium was introduced in a small-town setting by appealing to and adjusting to modern forms of social infrastructure provided by the free churches, the temperance, and worker’s societies. She has published on ethnographic method in Film and Media Studies; on cinematic space in the early period of Swedish cinema; on film programming in the pre-cinema period and she has also examined the complexity of memories of cinema going. With human geographer professor Mats Lundmark, Jernudd has published on film distribution and exhibition in the rural county of Jämtland, teasing out differences in the town as opposed to rural contexts in the immediate post-war period. The research addressed the paradox that the number of cinemas increased in rural Sweden at a time when urbanization was intense. The collaboration with Lundmark continued with a location analysis of cinemas in Sweden over time (1936 - 2003) considering different kinds of cinema ownership as well as population size and concentration. 

 

Teaching

Jernudd was awarded the Orebro University and Student Union Teaching Award in 1999. She won an Excellence-in-Teaching Grant from the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education in 2011 that gave her the opportunity to teach for a full semester at the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. 

 

Ongoing Research

Jernudd is principal investigator of the research project, "Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life: A study of cinema-going in its peak and decline", (VR, 2019 -2022). The purpose of the project is to further our knowledge of cinema as part of everyday life in 1950s and 1960s Sweden and to deepen our understanding about how cinema-going is remembered. Video-recordings of memories of audience’s experiences of cinema-going have been collected and will be used in a triangulated analysis involving also programming data and other contemporary, cinema-related material. One focus of analysis is to understand the experience of cinema audiences in urban as well as more rural locations. Another is to further the understanding of cinema memory as gendered. The study is also designed to reveal and compare narratives from a time when cinema-going was routine and ordinary as well as from a period of decline.

This study of "Swedish Cinema and Everyday Life" will offer a fresh perspective on canonized film history by providing a history of cinema-going from below. Furthermore, by combining ethnographic methods and archival research, the research will provide new perspectives on the relationship between institutional contexts of film consumption and audience memories of cinema-going. In collaboration with The National Library, the project will record and make available an important cultural heritage consisting of visual and textual historical evidence of cinema exhibition. 

Publications

Articles in journals |  Books |  Chapters in books |  Conference papers |  Data set |  Doctoral theses, monographs |  Reports | 

Articles in journals

Books

Chapters in books

Conference papers

Data set

Doctoral theses, monographs

Reports