Kyle Stine
A 1999 graduate of St. Johns High School was among the candidates receiving doctoral degrees during recent graduation ceremonies at the University of Iowa. Kyle Stine, whose field was film studies, completed his requirements with a highly regarded dissertation – Calculative Cinema: Technologies of Speed, Scale and Explication – exploring areas of cinema far distant from the immediate perception of “movies” as the term “film studies” might suggest.
Stine’s thesis approaches the realm of the movies through the often overlooked technical essentials of the industry and the impact that elements of sound, color, photography and human experience have played in the transition to the computerized world we know today. Stine traces the fundamental contributions of cinematic technologies to computer development and, conversely how the industry has reaped reciprocal benefits such as digital photography and projection. His project has been entered for the D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize at the University of Iowa and for the dissertation award of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
In the course of work toward his doctorate, Stine was a recipient of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship in the amount of $25,000 which allowed deeper research at such locations as the Library of Congress, MIT Institute Archives and Special Collections. The fellowship provided additional opportunities to attend and participate in several conferences that enhanced not only his research but also broadened insight into related pursuits.
Upon graduation Stine was invited to join the faculty at the University of Iowa as a one-year Visiting Assistant Professor in Cinema Studies, teaching an introductory lecture on film analysis in the fall and spring, a course on the history of documentary film in the fall and an undergraduate seminar on machine vision and animation in the spring.
Stine received Bachelor and Master Degrees from Michigan State University and University of Arizona, respectively.
He is the son of Ann Hufnagel and Brian Stine, both of St. Johns.