On 27 May 2025, RIAS PhD candidate Manar Ellethy will defend her dissertation, titled “Paying the Dues: Black Documentary Film & the Quest for Truth” at Leiden University.
Her project explores how African American documentary film in the 1960s attempted to subvert stereotypical understandings of black socio-political issues in an era of significant political transformations in race relations and black citizenship. Her project was supervised by Damian Pargas, William Michael Schmidli, and Pepita Hesselberth. Manar Ellethy became a PhD candidate at the RIAS in 2021, as part of the “Racial Democracy” scholarship project. She is currently a lecturer of Cultural History at Utrecht University.
The defense will take place at Academiegebouw, Rapenburg 73, Leiden.
For more insight into her research, you can visit her page at the RIAS website.
