Welcome to The Hands-On Film History Project, a research and teaching resource dedicated to inspiring new ways of thinking about the cinema’s past! The project is the companion website to CINE 490/590: Hands-On Film History, a course developed by Colin Williamson, PhD, in the Department of Cinema Studies at the University of Oregon. With the generous support of a 2024-2025 Williams Instructional Grant, the course was designed to explore a guiding question: What can students learn about film history when their access to the past expands beyond viewing, reading, and writing to include experimenting, tinkering, and creating with and about the archive?

The Hands-On Film History Project is itself an archive of how students have responded to that question. On these pages you’ll find useful research and teaching resources related to the class, along with collections of students’ creative works, blog entries written by students, and documentation of the course’s many exciting activities. The project is a living database that continues to grow with each iteration of the course. So, keep checking back for updates. And happy browsing!