Dr. Jülide Etem (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, where she also directs the Film Studies Concentration and chairs the Film Studies Curriculum Committee. A media studies scholar, Dr. Etem’s research examines how film operates within institutional infrastructures—how it is strategically sponsored, produced, exhibited, and circulated to shape public knowledge, manage populations, and mediate power.

Her forthcoming book, Film Diplomacy: A Media History of Turkey–US Relations (Columbia University Press, 2026), offers a groundbreaking analysis of educational film as a key instrument of geopolitical strategy. Focusing on the period from 1930 to 1986, the book traces how film was deployed to address infrastructural and public health challenges, promote development paradigms, and secure international alliances. Etem argues that these moving images were not merely persuasive tools, but complex visual technologies embedded with racialized logics of modernization and global governance.

Dr. Etem is currently leading three research projects that expand her interdisciplinary inquiry into media, policy, and visual epistemology:

Gun Violence and Documentary Film explores how nonfiction media operates as a slow infrastructure of care—making visible the grief, structural neglect, and community resistance that define the ongoing crisis of gun violence in the United States. Supported by grants from the Gun Violence Solutions Project, the Karsh Institute for Democracy, the Office of Citizen Scholar Development, and the Vice Provost for the Arts, this project bridges public health, visual culture, and participatory filmmaking.

Physics Film Experiments during the Cold War investigates the role of audiovisual media in shaping transnational scientific education. Drawing on archival research, this project analyzes how filmed physics experiments were used to teach, standardize, and promote specific epistemologies of knowledge and progress in the context of Cold War geopolitics.

Family Planning Narratives on Film examines the use of media in Cold War-era population control campaigns. This project traces how reproductive health films constructed global publics and communicated policy around fertility, autonomy, and social engineering—revealing the entanglement of cinema, development ideology, and demographic governance.

Across these projects, Dr. Etem’s scholarship highlights film’s role as a critical infrastructure of mediation—where knowledge is produced, policy communicated, and power exercised. Her work reveals how media operates within and across institutions, shaping narratives of public health, education, diplomacy, and governance. By tracing the circulation of film through scientific, political, and cultural domains, she redefines our understanding of cinema’s institutional life and its capacity to structure how we see, feel, and act in the world.

 To get connected, please reach Dr. Etem at aje4v@virginia.edu.