MEET OUR STUDENTS: Joseph Sherry – Film Scholar

When the American Film Institute released its list of the 100 greatest films of all time in 2007 and aired excerpts from the reels, Joseph Sherry was only in seventh grade. Rather than spend the summer running around outdoors, he decided to bike over to the Seekonk Public Library and rent the full-length movies – “Citizen Kane,” “The Searchers,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Double Indemnity,” “The Maltese Falcon” and many others.

“I made a list of every single film that I saw,” he said. “I’m up to like 1,200 films made before 1960. I very rarely watch films made after the 70s.”

Throughout middle and high school, Sherry also read up on big Hollywood studios such as MGM and Warner Brothers; famous directors like Billy Wilder, John Ford and Frank Capra; and actors like Gene Kelly, Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn.

He even made his own films during the summer with friends but found that he enjoyed watching them more than he enjoyed making them.

Upon graduating from high school, Sherry thought the next logical step would be to become a film director and recreate the films of the past. “It never dawned on me that I didn’t have to make films, that I could write about them. And I don’t mean writing about them as a film critic. I mean writing about them as a film scholar,” he said, “which is why I’m so thankful I came to RIC. The program here focuses on the study of film as opposed to film production. Without RIC I might have never found my career. I love every single class that I’ve taken, and I love all the professors I’ve had and my grades are great because I love what I do,” he said.

“Joe is a fantastic student,” said Associate Professor of English Vincent Bohlinger. In his freshman year, Sherry was elected president of the freshman class and president of the Ocean State Film Society, a student film club. He is a Presidential Scholarship recipient, which is a merit-based scholarship of at least $2,000 per year for up to four years of study. In his sophomore year, the film studies faculty designated him the 2014 Tess Hoffmann Film Studies Scholarship recipient – a $3,000 award, and he also won the Rising Star student leadership award. 

This spring, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the leading academic film and media studies organization in the country, selected Sherry and 26 other students out of 109 applicants from across the country to present their research papers at its annual undergraduate conference at the University of Oklahoma. 

“The acceptance rate to this conference is far lower than the professional SCMS conference that the film studies faculty attends each year,” said Bohlinger. “Not only that, Joe was the only sophomore selected among 26 juniors and seniors.”

All SCMS conferences are designed to provide a forum for scholars of film and media studies to present and discuss current research and to network. Proposals for papers, panels, workshops and screenings are evaluated and selected with an eye toward promoting the best scholarship and creative work in the field of cinema and media studies.

Sherry’s research was on movie director and choreographer Busby Berkeley who was known for his elaborate dance numbers, using hundreds of chorus girls. Sherry titled his paper “Shaping Spectacle for the Screen: Busby Berkeley and the 1930s Musical.”

“This conference was the best experience of my life,” Sherry said. “I consider myself a very content and happy person, but I can tell you that I’ve never been so happy in my life than I was those two days in Oklahoma. Staying on campus, getting to talk with faculty members, making connections with students that I had been pining to meet for so long. We walked around the campus. We laughed and talked about our favorite movies. And all of the students understood where I was coming from because they all want to do the same thing – be film scholars. Hopefully these lasting friendships will mean running into each other at conferences every year.”

Next fall Sherry will be a collegiate fellow (teaching assistant) for Bohlinger’s First Year Seminar course. Last fall he was a collegiate fellow for Professor of English Kathryn Kalinak.

“Both Professors Bohlinger and Kalinak are brilliant, erudite, amazing,” he said. “They have both shepherded me along the way to try and help me get into a good graduate program. And, yes. They’re already working on that.”