Star Wars has reached more than three generations of casual and hardcore fans alike, and as a result many of the producers of franchised Star Wars texts (films, television, comics, novels, games, and more) over the past four decades have been fans-turned-creators. Yet despite its dominant cultural and industrial positions, Star Wars has rarely been the topic of sustained critical work. Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling offers a corrective to this oversight by curating essays from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars in order to bring Star Wars and its transmedia narratives more fully into the fold of media and cultural studies. The collection places Star Wars at the center of those studies’ projects by examining video games, novels and novelizations, comics, advertising practices, television shows, franchising models, aesthetic and economic decisions, fandom and cultural responses, and other aspects of Star Wars and its world-building in their multiple contexts of production, distribution, and reception. In emphasizing that Star Wars is both a media franchise and a transmedia storyworld, Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling demonstrates the ways in which transmedia storytelling and the industrial logic of media franchising have developed in concert over the past four decades, as multinational corporations have become the central means for subsidizing, profiting from, and selling modes of immersive storyworlds to global audiences. By taking this dual approach, the book focuses on the interconnected nature of corporate production, fan consumption, and transmedia world-building. As such, this collection grapples with the historical, cultural, aesthetic, and political-economic implications of the relationship between media franchising and transmedia storytelling as they are seen at work in the world’s most profitable transmedia franchise.

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Art institutions have shown a growing interest in the moving image throughout the last two decades. Both museums and institutional art spaces have witnessed an increase in the exhibition of film and other moving images. In these spaces we can see films displayed along with other art forms, such as painting and sculpture, or as part of screen art installations. The proliferation of projected moving images and screens re-configures common assumptions about what cinema is and opens up a new set of questions concerning museum exhibition, film curating, and the cinematic experience. Does the gallery space change the way in which we think about and experience cinema? What are the boundaries between artist film and video and the traditional film institution? Which theoretical or conceptual links and historical connections can we establish between cinema as medium and museum as space? These are just some of the questions that arise from the fruitful encounter between museum and cinema. Thus, in this scenario, a conference such as Moving Image and Institution: Cinema and the Museum in the 21st Century was indeed necessary.Hosted by Cambridge University's Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), the conference was a joint project between faculty from the Department of Architecture and the Department of French (where the Screen Media group has been established). In the conference call for papers the organisers stressed the interdisciplinary character of the event, aimed at successfully bringing together delegates from across a wide range of disciplines including film studies, art history, museum studies, architecture, modern languages, and anthropology. Academics, museum curators, architects, filmmakers, and artists alike sought to overcome the scarce attention given to non-theatrical film exhibition in the museum. Although there are books on experimental film and avantgarde filmmakers, catalogues on particular 'film artists', and art history books on installation art, few publications have directly explored the relation between cinematic works and the space of the museum. The conference provided an extensive account of contemporary research on this topic.During three days the conference featured 16 parallel sessions divided between the Fitzwilliam College Auditorium and the smaller Gordon Cameron Lecture theatre. The 50 delegates in attendance, representing universities and cultural institutions in the United States, New Zealand, Canada, and Europe, explored a variety of topics in their papers; these ranged from theoretical and historiographical discussions about the complexities of time-based media exhibitions to aesthetic analysis of screen media art installations through the study of particular auteurs and film artist's work. Most of these, if not all, were established artists such as Peter Greennecsus -european journal of media studies (2012) volume 1/1 182 beatriz bartolomé herrera

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