Dr. Meredith C. Ward is a film and media historian and theorist in the Johns Hopkins University Film and Media Studies Program. She holds a Ph.D. from the Screen Cultures Program at Northwestern University. Her interests include cultural history as it relates to film, sound theory and auditory culture, and the history of film reception. Other research interests include space theory, urban history, and cinephilia. She wrote her dissertation, "Chatter, Reverberation, and the Static in the System," on the role of noise in American film culture, tracing it from the early days of film exhibition to the mobile era. It won the SCMS Dissertation Award in 2016, designed to recognize the best dissertation submitted to the international professional organization of scholars that year.
She teaches on film theory, cultural theory, and the "moving image" as it is broadly defined, including cinema and popular culture, television and Internet culture.
Meredith has presented at academic conferences in the United States and Europe, and was an invited guest speaker at the Chicago Film Seminar. Her work has been included in multiple annual meetings of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and the annual Screen conference in Glasgow.
She is the faculty adviser to the Film Society, where she trains students in film programming. She is also the designer of and faculty adviser to Studio North, JHU’s own film production company that funds prestigious student film projects. She innovated and created the studio in 2014 with the help of undergraduates. She has served as an advisor to Johns Hopkins' Woodrow Wilson research fellows, Provost's Undergraduate Research Award grant recipients, and students writing senior humanities theses in the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center.
She is affiliated faculty to the Center for Advanced Media Studies. She consults on film programming at the Film Center at 10 E. North Avenue in Baltimore.
She was a finalist for the 2012 and 2013 Excellence in Teaching Awards, and the 2016 Undergraduate Advising Award.
The logo for Meredith's pet project, Studio North, designed by JHU senior Genevieve Ott.