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Graduate Program in Communication & Culture

Faculty Profiles

Paul S. Moore

Media & Culture

University   Ryerson University
E-Mail Address   psmoore@ryerson.ca
Phone Number   (416)979-5000 ext. 2604
Office Location   JOR-306
Office Hours   TBA


Education

B.Sc. (Mount Allison), M.Sc. (Queen’s), PhD (York, Sociology)

Biography

Professor Moore studies the history of the mass market and urban modernity in North America. Overall, his work argues that amusement and leisure help constitute modern publics by providing spaces, rhetorics and logics for collective gathering. His previous project was a social history of the first decade of movie-going in Toronto and the midWest USA, tracing how the novelty of film became a mass practice through showmanship, regulation, and promotion. A new project, collaborating with Prof. Sandra Gabriele, examines the development of the weekend newspaper in the 1890s as a cultural technology animating modernity, central to the institutionalization of mass society.

Research Interests

Urban Sociology; Mass Society; History of the Mass Market; Newspapers; Film Exhibition.

Selected Publications

2008. Now Playing: Early Movie-going and the Regulation of Fun (Toronto 1906-1918). Albany: SUNY Press.

In Review, with Sandra Gabriele. “The Globe on Saturday, The World on Sunday: The Development of the Weekend Newspaper in Toronto, 1886-1895.”
2008. “Nationalist Film-going without Canadian-Made Films?” in Abel, Bertellini, and King, eds. Early Cinema and the “National.” Eastleight, UK: John Libbey.
2008. “Socially Combustible: Panicky People, Flammable Film, and the Dangerous New Technology of the Nickelodeon,” in Bennett, Furstenau, and MacKenzie, eds. Cinema and Technology: Cultures, Theories, Practices. New York: Palgrave.
2008. “Newfoundland Amusements: Early Picture Shows at the Fulcrum of Modern and Parochial St. John’s.” Newfoundland and Labrador Studies.
2005. “Everybody’s Going: City Newspapers and the Early Mass Market for Movies.” City & Community 4(4): 339-357.
2003. “Nathan L. Nathanson Introduces Canadian Odeon: Producing National Competition in Exhibition.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 12(2): 22-45.
Prof. Moore is director of the Canadian Theatre Historical Project (www.arts.ryerson.ca/canadiantheatres), which will compile the social histories of thousands of theatre and cinema buildings across the country. He is co-editor of Marquee, Journal of the Theatre Historical Society of America. He has published several essays on the history of film exhibition and movie-going in Canada and is an active member of associations for media and film studies, communications, and sociology.

 

 

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Harold [Innis] taught us how to use the bias of culture and communication as an instrument of research. By directing attention to the bias, or distorting power of the dominant imagery and technology of any culture, he showed us how to understand cultures.
~ Marshall McLuhan