Aurore Spiers

Aurore Spiers (she/her) is a film and media scholar and historian. She received her PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from The University of Chicago in 2022. Mainly focused on women’s contributions to film and media, her work interrogates historiographical processes—what history gets written, how, and why—through the lens of gender and intersectional and multidimensional feminism. It asks why women (and other marginalized groups) have so often been forgotten, and what strategies—critical, creative, speculative, etc.—may be employed against historical erasure.

Her first book, Archiving the Past: Women’s Film History in France, 1927–1978 (University of California Press, forthcoming January 2026), studies women’s labor in French film archives from the 1920s through the 1970s. She has published work connected to this project as well as related to broader interests in feminist media studies and transnational cinema. Her writing and reviews have appeared in 1895: Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-quinze, Feminist Media Histories, Film & History, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, The Moving Image, and Early Popular Visual Culture, as well as several edited books, including The Routledge Companion to American Film History (2025), edited by Pamela Robertson Wojcik and Paula Massood. With Clara Auclair, she is currently working on an edited collection of essays dedicated to the films of Alice Guy Blaché, the first woman filmmaker in the world, and a precursor of fiction filmmaking and early sound cinema in France and the United States. Since 2013, she has been an editorial contributor to the Women Film Pioneers Project, edited by Jane Gaines, Monica Dall’Asta, Radha Vatsal, and Kate Saccone, and published by Columbia University Libraries. Since 2025, she also serves as the book review editor (post-1900) for Early Popular Visual Culture.

feminist film and media studies, feminist film theory and history, film historiography, gender studies, archive theory, labor history, women filmmakers and movie workers, silent cinema, transnational cinema, French cinema, Hollywood