Eric Dienstfrey

Visiting Assistant Professor

Eric Dienstfrey researches the history of film, music, and sound media, specifically how new technology can both disrupt and reinforce an industry’s economic and aesthetic practices.

His work on loudspeakers, tape recording technologies, and the labor politics of film sound workers has appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film History, Music Sound and the Moving Image, among other journals. His 2016 article “The Myth of the Speakers” won the 2017 Katherine Singer Kovács Award from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies.

He recently completed his first book, titled Making Stereo Fit, about Hollywood’s fifty-year struggle to turn the phenomenon of surround sound into a profitable storytelling tool.

Department

Media and Communication Studies

Degrees

B.A., Washington University in Saint Louis
• M.A. & Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison

Teaching

Public Speaking
Introduction to Film
Media Industries
Sound Technologies
Film & Emotion
World Cinema
Common Intellectual Experience

Research Interests

History of Technology
Film and Psychology
Sound Studies
Narrative Theory
Media Industries
Iranian Cinema

Recent Work

Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology. University of California Press. 2024. (UC Press)

“Tape Recording Hollywood: The Inaudibility of New Film Sound Technology.” Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 16, no. 2 (2022): 101–127. (Project Muse)

“Under the Standard: MGM, AT&T, and the Academy’s Regulation of Power.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 59, no. 3 (2020): 23–45. (Project Muse)

“Monocentrism, or Soundtracks in Space.” In Voicing the Cinema: Film Music and the Integrated Soundtrack, edited by James Buhler and Hannah Lewis, 229–44. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. (Project Muse)

“Media Dialogues.” The Velvet Light Trap 28 (2018): 43–60. (Project Muse)

“The Myth of the Speakers: A Critical Reexamination of Dolby History.” Film History 28, no. 1 (2016): 167–193. (Project Muse)