Eduardo Ledesma, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, is among 7 faculty members who are recipients of Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) fellowships for the 2019–20 academic year.

Ledesma received a fellowship for his project “Blind Cinema: Visually Impaired Filmmakers and Technologies of Sight."

His book project, Blind Cinema, has two aims: to raise critical awareness about the existence of blind filmmakers, and to establish the contours of a blind cinematic style through theories of the gaze and haptic film. “It’s the first book to examine how visually impaired filmmakers use digital media to make visible the experience of disability and destabilize stereotypes about the blind,” he said.

The book studies films by visually impaired directors, as well as of collaborations between blind and sighted filmmakers, and shows how the aesthetics and content of these works represent the experience of blindness. Blind Cinema argues that the singular perspective afforded by visually impaired filmmakers helps both blind and sighted people understand each other better. “It places the sighted within the optical experience of the non-sighted, and it enables the non-sighted to engage with film, the preeminent art of vision,” Ledesma said.  

“The book raises consciousness about accessibility to filmmaking for the visually impaired, documents films that capture how the blind navigate our sighted environment, dismantles stereotypes about visual disability, and challenges the assumed primacy of vision in visual culture,” he added.