Ayşehan Jülide Etem is Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia, where she directs the Film Studies Concentration and co-directs the Bilimer Turkish Studies Initiative. A media scholar and film historian, Etem examines how institutional agents use film and other media to shape public knowledge and opinion and to pursue political, ideological, educational, commercial, and social aims.

Her first book, Film Diplomacy: A Media History of Turkey–US Relations (Columbia University Press, 2026) offers the first comprehensive media history of how educational film helped forge the Turkey–US alliance and shape modern Turkey between 1930 and 1986. Drawing on previously unexamined and recently declassified archives in both countries, Etem defines film diplomacy as a process encompassing sponsorship, production, translation, distribution, exhibition, and audience research. By following how institutional agents use films in schools, hospitals, embassies, and open public spaces, she demonstrates how diplomacy became embedded in everyday life.

Film Diplomacy also challenges one-directional accounts of American cultural influence. US government programs built on earlier missionary film networks, redirecting them from Christianization toward modernization, free-market capitalism, and anticommunism. Turkish officials were not passive recipients, they adapted and expanded this media infrastructure to advance their own vision of a homogeneous, secular, and Western-facing nation. Across these projects, whiteness operated as an often-unspoken measure of progress and belonging, marginalizing Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Black communities, and others who complicated that national image. By combining close analysis to the messages contained in films with a close attention the institutions, infrastructures, and audience encounters that gave them power, Film Diplomacy demonstrates that cinema helped organize national and transnational relations. The book has been reviewed in Media, War & Conflict and by the USC Center on Public Diplomacy.

Etem’s current research extends this inquiry into the afterlives of gun violence. Her recent article, “Documentary as Slow Care Infrastructure: Afterlives of Gun Violence”, published in Communication, Culture & Critique in 2026, asks what documentary can do after the news attention recedes. She develops the concept of “slow care infrastructure” to explain how films can preserve testimony, foster trauma-informed forms of engagement, move survivor knowledge across institutions, and generate relationships and material interventions that continue long after filming is complete. A book-length project builds on this research to trace the changing meanings of firearms across American educational, public service, and documentary media. This work has received support from the Gun Violence Solutions Project at UVA’s Karsh Institute for Democracy, the Office of Citizen Scholar Development, and the Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts.

Two forthcoming articles carry her study of media infrastructure into the governance of science and reproduction. “From Berkeley to Istanbul: Physics Films and the Governance of Cold War Science,” forthcoming in Film History, identifies and analyzes physics film experiments in the US and Turkey, showing how institutional agents used audiovisual media to standardize pedagogy, generate audience data, and helped define scientific authority during the Cold War. “Making Population Visible: Women’s Bodies, Food Scarcity, and Cold War Reproductive Governance,” forthcoming in Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal in 2027, examines how films made women’s bodies bear the political burden of anxieties over population growth, food scarcity, and global development.

Since the publication of Film Diplomacy, Etem has presented her research to audiences in Türkiye, Italy, and France, including at Koç University’s ANAMED, Başkent University, Bilkent University, the University of Bologna. In September 2026, she will speak at the University of Michigan’s Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, followed by a talk at American University’s School of International Service in October. She has discussed Film Diplomacy on the New Books Network, the Ottoman History Podcast, and Business Talk. A three-part series for Rorotoko introduced the idea of film diplomacy to a broader public while her wider public scholarship includes a lecture for Environmental Fridays.

At UVA, Etem teaches courses in film history, documentary, nontheatrical media, and film production, connecting archival research with close analysis and hands-on filmmaking. She works closely with students to consider what films mean, whom they address, where they travel, and what effects they produce in the world.

In 2026, she was invited to serve as an inaugural member of UVA’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities Advisory Board and elected Co-Chair of the Nontheatrical Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

For speaking invitations, research collaborations, media inquiries, or student opportunities, please contact her at aje4v@virginia.edu.