Photo of Jay Beck

Jay Beck

Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, Cinema and Media Studies

Education & Professional History

State University of New York (Buffalo), BA; University of Iowa, MA, PhD


At Carleton since 2010.

Highlights & Recent Activity

Beck, Jay, and Cecilia Cornejo Sotelo. “Forging Fiction from Reality: The Films of Alejo Moguillansky.” Senses Of Cinema, Issue 110 (August 2024).

Beck, Jay. “Search and Destroy: Punk in Advertising – Selling a Subculture.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Advertising, edited by James Deaville, Ron Rodman, and Siu-Lan Tan. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Beck, Jay. Designing Sound: Audiovisual Aesthetics in 1970s American Cinema. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016.

Beck, Jay. “Submerged in Sound: Lucrecia Martel’s La ciénaga.” The Cine-Files no. 8 (Spring 2015).

Beck, Jay. “The Democratic Voice: Robert Altman’s Sound Aesthetics in the 1970s.” In A Companion to Robert Altman, edited by Adrian Danks. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

Beck, Jay, with Vanessa Theme Ament. “The New Hollywood, 1981-1999.” In Sound: Dialogue, Music and Effects, edited by Kathryn Kalinak. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015.

Beck, Jay. “Sound Studies in a Liberal Arts Curriculum.” Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier 2, no. 2 (Spring 2014).

Beck, Jay, and Vicente Rodriguez Ortega, eds. Contemporary Spanish Cinema and Genre. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 2008.

Beck, Jay, and Tony Grajeda, eds. Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008.

Organizations & Scholarly Affiliations

Editorial Board, Music, Sound, and the Moving Image

Editorial Board, Tecmerin: Journal of Audiovisual Essays

Editorial Board, Film Criticism

Current Courses

  • Fall 2024
    CAMS 100: Rock 'n' Roll in Cinema
  •  
    CAMS 212: Contemporary Spanish Cinema
  • Winter 2025
    CAMS 110: Introduction to Cinema and Media Studies
  • Spring 2025
    CAMS 214: Film History III
  •  
    CAMS 265: Sound Design