New faculty profile: Amy Borden

With Portland State’s film major exploding in popularity, Amy Borden is happy to be the newest addition to the school.

Specializing in silent films and American cinema, Borden spent the last two years working at Minnesota’s St. Olaf College, helping to design their film program.

To her, the film program at PSU is in a great place with the people they’ve hired over the past few years.

“It’s an amazing opportunity to be in on the ground floor of a really interesting and innovative program that we’re designing,” she said.

This term, Borden is teaching “Understanding Movies,” the main introductory class for film majors, and “Film History I,” a class that focuses on the pre-studio era in the U.S.

“We’re looking at the way that [films] were this popular amusement that started in New York with nickelodeons, where you can pay a nickel and watch a movie,” Borden said. “And how it has become this huge institution that really grounds the California economy up until this day.”

Next term, Borden will get closer to her specialty by teaching an elective on silent films.

Borden has traveled around a lot and lived in a number of different places, but really enjoys being here in Portland.

“The West Coast’s got this vibe that I really dig,” Borden said. Her wife lives in California, so Borden jokes that if she ever gets tired of the rainy weather here she can just go down there for a couple days.

Borden said that, for students, writing is undoubtedly the most important thing to learn to do in college. “Take care with your writing, and understand that it’s going to take multiple, multiple drafts to get what you want out of your writing,” she said.

She enjoys leading her classroom as part lecture and part discussion. If students have questions, they are encouraged to speak up.

“I like to run my class as a seminar as much as I can with 40, 50 or 100 students,” Borden said, adding that the discussions are always very interesting conversations.