Virtual Summit Submission

Johns Hopkins University
English and Film & Media Studies

Biography

Natalie is a senior at Johns Hopkins University majoring in English and Film & Media Studies and minoring in Writing Seminars and Comparative Thought & Literature. At Hopkins, she serves in various editorial roles, including those as Editor-in-Chief of literary and arts magazines Out of the Blue Jay and Zeniada, as well as an editor for The Macksey Journal, a journal of proceedings of the Richard Macksey National Undergraduate Humanities Research Symposium. Natalie is also a Writing Center tutor for the University Writing Program, staff writer and showrunner for the Film & Media Studies Department’s Writers Room, and oral history research assistant and transcriptionist for the Berman Institute of Bioethics. Her primary interests revolve around intermediality, early 20th-century literature and film, and detective fiction, all of which she hopes to continue researching and writing about as she pursues a PhD in English literature.

Project

A Screen of One's Own: Female Spectatorship and Filmic Writing in Early British Cinema
This project examines how women audiences responded to, (re)interpreted, and interacted with cinematic texts and culture in early British cinema. By analyzing female-penned transformative works and written reception—including novels, ephemera, poetry, and magazine excerpts—I aim to present the possibilities of fandom and fan creations as a historical mode of women's engagement with film culture and community amid interwar Britain. This project examines material from four archives (the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum, the BFI National Archive, The Keep, and Oxford’s Bodleian Library) and analyzes original writing, including film novelizations, criticism, and works submitted to the poetry section in film fan magazines such as Picturegoer (1911-1960). In developing my writing around this research, I will also consider the place of materials written largely by working-class women and housewives within a historiography of film-inspired works and criticism by commercially established British women authors of the time, ranging from Virginia Woolf’s seminal essay “The Cinema” to the lesser-known novel Farewell Leicester Square by Betty Miller.