Jacqueline Stewart is the New Host of TCM's Silent Sunday Nights

Turner Classic Movies has named Jacqueline Stewart the new host of Silent Sunday Nights. Jacqueline Stewart is a professor of cinema and media studies at the University of Chicago. She is the first regular host at TCM who is African American and only the third regular host at TCM who is a woman (the first being Tiffany Vasquez and the second being Alicia Malone).

Prof. Stewart's new position as host of Silent Sunday Nights is not the first time she has worked with Turner Classic Movies. A few years ago she co-curated the Pioneers of African-American Cinema box set, which dealt with the race films made in the first several decades of the 20th Century. It was at that time that she presented two nights of programming on TCM devoted to race films alongside Ben Mankiewicz. At the 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival she was part of the "Through a Lens of Colour: Black Representation in Film" panel discussion. At the 2019 TCM Classic Film Festival Prof. Stewart was the special guest at a screening of The Defiant Ones (1958) and part of "The Complicated Legacy of Gone with the Wind" panel discussion.

Jacqueline Stewart boasts an impressive resume when it comes to cinema, particularly the Silent Era. Her dissertation was even on silent film. She is a three time appointee to the National Film Preservation Board and is the chair of its Diversity Task Force. Her 2005 book Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity examined the relationship between African Americans and cinema during a period when cinema was just beginning and African Americans were migrating from the South to the cities of the North. At the University of Chicago she is also the founder of the South Side Home Movie Project, which archives home movies made by residents of Chicago's South Side, as well as the co-curator of the LA Rebellion Preservation Project.

Jacqueline Stewart begins hosting duties on Silent Sundays on September 15 with Lewis Milestone's comedy Two Arabian Knights (1927). Over the next few months she will be presenting a wide array of silent movies, including the early feature film Cleopatra (1912--produced by actress Helen Garner, it was the first film produced by any actor), Oscar Micheaux's The Symbol of the Unconquered (1921), Carl Theodor Dreyer's Master of the House (1925), and The Smart Set (1928).

I think that I can speak for most TCM fans when I say that we want our TCM hosts to be both knowledgeable about classic film and enthusiastic about classic film. Prof. Stewart meets both of these requirements wonderfully. In fact, I am not sure, but I think she might be the first TCM host with a doctorate. And Jacqueline Stewart is clearly enthusiastic about classic movies. When she speaks about classic cinema, she is clearly speaking about a subject she loves. For those reasons I am very happy that she is the new host of Silent Sunday Nights.