{"id":69521,"date":"2013-10-28T09:23:02","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T13:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=69521"},"modified":"2024-07-01T17:00:04","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T21:00:04","slug":"bates-welcomes-new-faculty-jonathan-cavallero-rhetoric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2013\/10\/28\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-jonathan-cavallero-rhetoric\/","title":{"rendered":"Bates welcomes new faculty: Jonathan Cavallero, rhetoric"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_69724\" style=\"width: 610px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2013\/10\/web_130924_Faculty_Portraits_054.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-69724\" class=\"size-large wp-image-69724\" alt=\"Jonathan Cavalerro, assistant professor of rhetoric (Mike Bradley\/Bates College)\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2013\/10\/web_130924_Faculty_Portraits_054-600x400.jpg\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2013\/10\/web_130924_Faculty_Portraits_054-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2013\/10\/web_130924_Faculty_Portraits_054-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2013\/10\/web_130924_Faculty_Portraits_054.jpg 1080w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-69724\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Jonathan Cavalerro, assistant professor of rhetoric (Mike Bradley\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>The sight of a raging giant ape on a skyscraper brings out the wise guy in most of us. But when Jonathan Cavallero first taught a class at Bates, he found that the classic film <em>King Kong<\/em>\u00a0 evoked, more than anything, the intellectual spark of Bates students.<\/p>\n<p>As a candidate for the rhetoric faculty, film studies specialist Cavallero made his teaching presentation in February 2013. He taught a class in Charles Nero&#8217;s course &#8220;White Redemption,&#8221; which examines movies that use the black experience to, in effect, showcase the goodness of white people.<\/p>\n<p><em>King Kong<\/em> was the topic when Cavallero led the session. Having taught at the University of Arkansas and Penn State, he had to adjust in a hurry to the smallness of the class. At the same time, he was deeply impressed by the students&#8217; initiative.<\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%\" width=\"100%\" \/>\n<p><em>Read more profiles of tenure-track <em>faculty<\/em> <em>new <\/em>at Bates in 2013:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2013\/10\/21\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-lydia-barnett-history\/\"><em>Lydia Barnett, assistant professor of history<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2013\/11\/04\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-travis-gould-physics\/\"><em>Travis Gould, assistant professor of physics<\/em><\/a><\/li>\n<li><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2013\/11\/11\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-brooke-oharra-theater\/\">Brooke O&#8217;Harra, assistant professor of theater<\/a><\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%\" width=\"100%\" \/>\n<p>&#8220;They did a fantastic job of linking back our discussion to the things the course had been emphasizing for the weeks,&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n<p>Cavallero started as assistant professor this fall. We tend to associate &#8220;rhetoric&#8221; with writing and speaking, but schools like Bates see it broadly, defining rhetoric as the study of how people use symbolic systems &#8212; not only verbal languages &#8212; to play out their roles in the world.<\/p>\n<p>Movies and television have their own symbolic systems, of course. And as moving images have conquered communications, understanding those systems is essential to cultural citizenship. The converse is also true: from <em>King Kong<\/em> to<em> Citizen Kane<\/em> to<em> Modern Family<\/em> to a one-handed catch contest on YouTube, moving images afford a powerful lens for examining society and culture.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I\u2019m interested in the cultural place of the movies, and how they help us think about social identities that we attached to others or ourselves,&#8221; says Cavallero \u2014 identities such as ethnicity, gender or sexuality.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A lot of what I\u2019m doing is using cultural studies to create a context around film&#8221; and to illustrate how films reflect or affect time, place and people. For example, in his course on Bollywood, a particular interest of Cavallero&#8217;s, students look at how Bollywood and other filmmaking centers have emulated one another in hopes of reaching still larger audiences.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;At what point do those crossovers water everything down to the point that it\u2019s all homogenized, and you lose some of that local flavor?&#8221; he says.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I\u2019m conflicted because I love some Bollywood movies that are very slick and very Hollywood. They have action scenes and superheroes, and you can have a good time watching them &#8212; but I also worry about that. Because sometimes, those films can look like <em>Iron Man<\/em>, and part of the fun of Bollywood is that it&#8217;s different from Hollywood.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Pedagogy in the multicultural classroom is another focus for Cavallero, and film builds cross-cultural connections. &#8220;Students bring in their own views and political perspectives, and they can talk about a movie with classmates who have very different views from them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Immersion in moving imagery gives everyone common references. &#8220;Students come in ready to participate, ready to talk, excited,&#8221; says Cavallero, who&#8217;s teaching Bollywood and film theory this fall. &#8220;As the course progresses, they&#8217;ll learn new theoretical perspectives and the vocabulary of film studies, but even in the early weeks of a class they&#8217;re pretty confident in their knowledge of the subject and they tend to be willing to jump right in.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I\u2019ve always seen that as an opportunity because I learn so much from them.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Cavallero earned a doctorate in communication and culture and in American studies at Indiana University. He has taught at the University of Arkansas; at Penn State, where he earned a master&#8217;s degree in media studies; and at Indiana. He earned a bachelor&#8217;s degree in government at Georgetown University.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;I\u2019m interested in the cultural place of the movies, and how they help us think about social identities,&#8221; says Jonathan Cavallero, assistant professor of rhetoric.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":69724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,14],"tags":[3520,10082,10083,10754],"class_list":["post-69521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-faculty-staff","tag-film","tag-film-studies","tag-jonathan-cavallero","tag-rhetoric-film-and-screen-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69521"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69521\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95601,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69521\/revisions\/95601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/69724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}