Lecture: Eastman Kodak, Tennessee Eastman, and Film’s Militant Chemistry in the New South

The Department of Theatre and Film presents a lecture by Dr. Alice Lovejoy (University of Minnesota) based on her new book, Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (University of California Press). The book explores how the manufacture of film stock - considered as a product of the chemical industry, rather than solely as a raw material for film and photography - intersects with the history of military technologies from poison gas to the atom bomb, which Kodak chemists helped create by enriching uranium. 

Alice Lovejoy is Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and the Program in Moving Image, Media, and Sound at the University of Minnesota, and a former editor at Film Comment. She is the author of Tales of Militant Chemistry: The Film Factory in a Century of War (University of California Press, 2025) as well as the award-winning Army Film and the Avant Garde (Indiana University Press, 2015). With Mari Pajala, she edited the volume Remapping Cold War Media (Indiana University Press, 2022), and her co-edited volume Film Stock: An International History of a Sensitive Medium is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Her research has been supported by, among others, Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Howard Foundation, and the Cain Distinguished Fellowship at the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry.