(re)producing cult TV: Battlestar Galactica
featuring Oscar nominee Mary McDonnell

Please join us on Friday, March 2, 2007 at 4:30 in Salomon 001 for the exciting opportunity to hear Academy Award nominated actress Mary McDonnell, star of the smash hit television series Battlestar Galactica, discuss her role as President Laura Roslin as part of the panel discussion "Reproducing Cult TV: Battlestar Galactica." This panel, moderated by television studies Professor Lynne Joyrich, will also feature critical analysis of one of TV's most fascinating and culturally relevant shows by members of the Department of Modern Culture and Media, the Department of American Civilization, and the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women. Audience members will have the chance to participate in a question and answer session with McDonnell and other participants during the discussion.

When the Cylons, a race of machines who have evolved into identical copies of human beings, attacked and destroyed the human colonies, the remaining survivors became a race of unwilling nomads, no longer at home on their devastated planets or even in their own skins. With this premise, no current television series has generated as much recent critical excitement than the vividly re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. Tapping into cultural anxieties and pleasures around the delirious vulnerability of human identity, our intimate relation to technology, life in a post 9/11 world, and the increasingly indistinct line between ourselves and the other, this series has generated a dynamic nexus between fan communities, academics, and popular culture at the interface between television and new media forms. "(Re)producing Cult TV: Battlestar Galactica" examines the ways in which TV (re)produces and reframes current events, regenerates the mode of televisual and other mediums, thematizes reproduction in a time of technology, and questions the making and remaking of our own identities. Mary McDonnell, whose character President Laura Roslin is at the heart of all the sticky and enigmatic questions that the series explores, brings a "behind the scenes" perspective to all these questions and more.

It is a great honor to welcome Mary McDonnell to Brown. Her acting career is marked by tremendous success on stage and screens both big and small. She spent over 20 years performing with the renowned Long Wharf Theatre Company and won a prestigious OBIE award in 1980 for her work in the play Still Life. In 1991, her Academy and Golden Globe nominated supporting role as Stands with a Fist in Dances with Wolves thrust her into the spotlight, and she was singled out again in 1992 with Oscar and Golden Globe nominations as best lead actress for her role in Passion Fish. Her other films include Matewan (1987), Grand Canyon (1991), Sneakers (1992), Independence Day (1996) and Donnie Darko (2001). Before Battlestar Galactica, she had a long and varied career in television, including her Emmy-nominated turn as Eleanor Carter on NBC's ER. McDonnell's professional interests extend beyond her acting career; she recently joined the advisory board of the SciFi Channel's "Visions for Tomorrow" campaign, which brings together scientists, futurists, artists, writers, political activists, and business leaders to examine key social issues and to engage in educational outreach.

Mary McDonnell's current role as President Laura Roslin on Battlestar Galactica reflects once again the relevance of this series to current political events, but her subtle, nuanced performance of a woman unexpectedly thrust into power at a time of crises is less interesting as a case study of a "woman president" than as a critical commentary on the ethical ambiguities of leadership in a time of war. Laura Roslin, 43rd in line to the presidency, ascends to power after the destruction of most of the human race in a surprise assaults by the Cylons, a race of machines initially created by humans as slaves, who rebel, evolve (into beings indistinguishable from the humans themselves), and return to wreak havoc--materially and spiritually--on their former masters. Roslin wrestles with the blurred line between civilian, spiritual, and military leadership in wartime; the ethics of torture; the integrity of the political process; and her own hybrid identity: now part Cylon, a result of a blood transfusion from the child of a Cylon mother and a human father, Roslin embodies the very ambiguities that the series so carefully and ruthlessly explores.

Please join us for "(Re)producing Cult TV: Battlestar Galactica," a unique opportunity to discuss one of the most exciting and thought-provoking programs on TV today with series star Mary McDonnell; Professor Lynne Joyrich, David Bering-Porter, and Julie Levin Russo of the Department of Modern Culture and Media; Melanie Kohnen of the Department of American Civilization; and Alanna Thain of the Pembroke Center for Research and Teaching on Women. The panel will take place from 4:30-6:30 on Friday, March 2, 2007 in Salomon 001. Doors open at 4:00 pm; a reception will follow. This event is sponsored by the Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Research in Culture and Media Studies and the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. The event is closed to members of the Brown community and their guests. For further information please call 401-863-2853. For further information on the program Battlestar Galactica, visit the SciFi Channel site.