Sigal Yona, a Ph.D. candidate at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies at Ghent University, will visit UVA later this March as part of UVA Jewish Studies' new visiting PhD student fellowship.

Sigal's research interests include language and cultural mediation, transnational studies, cinema memory, and film history and historiography. Her dissertation explores the history of cinema-going in Tel Aviv between the 1950s and the 1970s. This period, marked by significant waves of immigration, saw the emergence of a highly diverse film exhibition scene, including films from various countries in the Eastern Mediterranean and South Asia—as well as Yiddish films. She studies how mass immigration shaped local film practices, how audiences engaged with these films, and what distinctive cultural and emotional experiences they offered. 

On March 31, she will deliver a lecture, based upon her research, entitled, "From West to East: Cinema-Going and the Reinvention of Urban Culture in Mid-Century Tel Aviv." You can learn more about that event here. She hopes that UVA's faculty and students will offer her valuable feedback on her research. She also looks forward to engaging several faculty members who share her interest in language and soundscapes, as well as qualitative research methods.