Participant Info

First Name
Diana
Last Name
Anselmo
Country
United States
State
NY
Affiliation
University of Pennsylvania
Website URL
https://nursingclio.org/author/diana-w-anselmo/
Keywords
Feminist Media History, Queer History, Silent Cinema, Fan Studies, Material Cultures, History of Technology & Medicine, Lithium Extraction, Global Environmental Histories
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

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About Me

Diana W. Anselmo is a historian of queer reception in US silent cinema, affective labor in global media, fire in built environments, and lithium extraction in Portuguese soil.

She has published extensively on gender and sexuality in US media, including in Screen, Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Film History, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Film Quarterly, Feminist Media Histories, The Journal of Women’s History, and JCMS: Journal of Cinema & Media Studies. She is also the author of A Queer Way of Feeling: Girl Fans & Personal Archives of Early Hollywood (University of California Press, 2023)

She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Cinema & Media Studies; a member of the Columbia Climate School’s Co-Production of Knowledge Earth Network; and the Writer in Residence for the non-profit Medical Humanities collective Nursing Clio, where she writes peer-reviewed historical essays on medicine, public health, and media history.

Recent Publications

“Green Energy, Green Grabbing, Good Feeling: The Medical and Environmental Histories of Lithium in Portuguese Soil.” Technology & Culture (forthcoming).

“Technologies of Intimacy: Film, Photography, and Early Female Audiences.” Feminist Film History Handbook. Ed. Shelley Stamp (forthcoming 2027). 

“Come to My Cottage: Queer Pleasures and Female Fandom in Silent Hollywood.”Notches: History of Sexuality (May 2026).

“To Love So Much It Hurts: In the Margins of Early Cinephilia.”Film Quarterly 79.1 (Fall 2025): 56-60.

“ ‘I Want to Be Good:’ Morality, Faith and Female Spectatorial Pleasure during World War I.”New Review of Film and Television Studies 22.1 (Spring 2024): 6-33.

“Fire in the Hole: Negative Feelings in Silent Film Fan Communities.”Feminist Media Histories 10.1 (Winter 2024): 28-56.

“Picture Pain: Anti-Heteronormative Female Fandom in Early Hollywood.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 62.1 (Fall 2022): 7-35. 

“The ‘Girl Suicide Epidemic’ of the 1910s: Pain & Prejudice in US Newspapers.” Journal of Women’s History 34.3 (Fall 2022): 34-58. 

“Alternative Archives, or The Things We Did Not Lose in the Fire.” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, In Focus Dossier, 60.4 (Summer 2021): 160-167.

“Bound by Paper: Girl Fans, Movie Scrapbooks, and Hollywood Reception during World War I.”Film History: An International Journal 31.3 (Fall 2019): 141-172.

“Gender & Queer Fan Labor on Tumblr: The Case of ‘BBC’s Sherlock.’”Feminist Media Histories 4.1 (Winter 2018): 84-114.

“Betwixt and Between, Forever Sixteen: American Silent Cinema and the Emergence of Female Adolescence.”Screen Journal 58.3 (Autumn 2017): 251-284. Winner of the 2019 Screen Journal Award

“Made in Movieland: Imitation, Agency, and Girl Movie Fandom in the 1910s.”Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies 32.1 94 (Spring 2017): 129-165. 

“Screen-Struck: The Invention of the Movie Girl Fan.” Cinema Journal 55.1 (Fall 2015): 1-28.

Media Coverage
Country Focus
Expertise by Geography
United States, Western Europe
Expertise by Chronology
19th century, 20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
Children & Youth, Colonialism, Gender, Labor, Libraries & Archives, Material Culture, Medicine, Migration & Immigration, Public History, Race, Science, Sexuality, Technology, Women, World War I