Memories of Public Television: Revisiting Frederick Wiseman’s Deaf and Blind Series
Jennifer Cazenave (Associate Professor, French and Cinema & Media Studies, Boston University)
with a response by Fiona Somerset (Literatures, Cultures, and Languages & Social and Critical Inquiry, UConn)
Wednesday, November 5, 2025, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)
The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.
In September 1984, Frederick Wiseman undertook the Deaf and Blind series, a four-part documentary about the Alabama Institute for Deaf and Blind in Talladega. At the time, Wiseman was already a veteran of public television: he had made more than a dozen documentaries for PBS, establishing a reputation as an auteur who achieved access inside myriad American institutions. The Deaf and Blind series was broadcast on PBS in 1988, two years before the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Several decades later, this four-part documentary remains a marginalized media object in Wiseman’s archive of American life. This talk reconsiders the Deaf and Blind series through the lens of overlooked histories and perspectives, including issues of access and mainstreaming debates that harken back to the 19th century.
Jennifer Cazenave is Associate Professor of French and Cinema & Media Studies at Boston University. She is currently a Visiting Residential Fellow at UCHI. Her research interests include documentary cinema, disability studies, archive and memory studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and gender studies. She is the author of An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah.” Her work has also appeared in edited volumes, journals, and magazines including SubStance, Cinema Journal, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Social and Critical Inquiry at the University of Connecticut, where she has served as Codirector of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and Interim Director of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is finishing work on a book on the medieval history of consent through silence, and preparing to write another book on personhood in the Middle Ages.
Access note
If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities. Requests should be made at least five business days in advance whenever possible
