Rate My Professor Agata Frymus

Dr Agata Frymus is a Senior Lecturer in Film and Television Studies at Monash University Malaysia, School of Arts and Social Sciences. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of York (2018), with a thesis titled European Stardom in Silent Hollywood: Pola Negri, Vilma Bánky and Jetta Goudal, supervised by Prof Andrew Higson. She also earned an MA in Film and Television Studies from the University of Bristol (2014) and a BA (Hons) in Film and Media and Cultural Studies from the University of the West of England (2012). Her career trajectory includes a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellowship (Horizon 2020) at Ghent University, Belgium (2018-2020), where she was principal investigator on the project Black Cinema-Going in New York during the Interwar Period. Prior to Monash, she taught courses such as TFT00023C Cinema: History and Analysis at the University of York (2016-2018) and FATV10006 Filmmaking Through Hitchcock at the University of Bristol (2017-2018). At Monash University Malaysia, she convenes and delivers units including AMU1223 Film, TV and Screen Studies: Approaches, AMU2448 Film Genres, AMU3021 Audience Studies: Sources and Methods, and has provided guest lectures for ATS3985 Screening Europe: Transnational histories, narratives and identities at the Monash Prato campus in Italy.

Dr Frymus specializes in film history, star studies, and silent cinema, focusing on the intersections of race, ethnicity, stardom, and audiences, particularly women as consumers, producers, and stars in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as Malaysian film culture. Her monograph Damsels and Divas: European Stardom in Silent Hollywood was published by Rutgers University Press in 2020 and awarded the Best Monograph by an Early Career Researcher in 2021. Key publications include Black moviegoing in Harlem: The case of Alhambra Theatre, 1905-1931 (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2023), A united stand and a concerted effort: black cinema-going in Harlem and Jacksonville during the silent era (The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories, 2024), White screens, Black fandom: silent film and African American spectatorship in Harlem (Early Popular Visual Culture, 2023, BAFTSS Annual Best Article Award 2023 recipient), and forthcoming works such as Berita Filem, Malay fan magazines, and modernity in the early 1960s (Modern Asian Studies, 2025) and The movie-struck girl in British Malaya, 1919–1937 (Women’s History Review, 2024). She was named Australia’s leading researcher in film in The Australian’s 2025 Research Rankings, received the Dean’s Commendation for Excellence in Research by an Early Career Researcher (2023) and Best Doctoral Article Award (2018), and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Early Popular Visual Culture since 2019 and Feminist Media Studies since 2021.