Nikola Stepić Wins Early Career Scholar Best Paper Award by SCMS Adult Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group

Nikola Stepić, PhD Candidate in Humanities, has been named the inaugural winner of the Early Career Scholar Best Paper Award by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) Adult Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group and the journal Porn Studies.

Stepić’s paper, titled “Erotic Countermapping and Queer Urban Publics: The Hard-Core Cinema of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.,” highlights the pioneering queer filmmaker’s 1970s adult films shot in San Francisco and argues that they represent formal experiments which crystallize eros, urban living and fantasy as utopian mentalités central to the maturation of queer masculinities.

Stepić has previously been named a Concordia Public Scholar, and has also received the Gerald Pratley Award from the Film and Media Studies Association of Canada (FMSAC) for contributing to the understanding of cinema and media produced in Canada/Québec.

The notice by the SCMS Adult Film and Media Scholarly Interest group outlines Stepić’s contribution as follows:

"The SCMS Adult Film and Media Scholarly Interest Group and the journal Porn Studies are pleased to announce the inaugural winner of the Early Career Scholar Best Paper Award is “Erotic Countermapping and Queer Urban Publics: The Hard-Core Cinema of Arthur J. Bressan, Jr.” by Nikola Stepić of Concordia University in Montréal, Canada."

The adjudication committee was particularly impressed with Stepić’s innovative approach to theorizing queer temporality and novel engagement of geographic methods. The article’s cross-pollination of rigorous methodological and theoretical approaches from different fields is a useful way to add new dimension to adult film and media studies.

In addition, the committee commends Stepić for highlighting an understudied filmmaker. As the winner of the Early Career Scholar Best Paper Award, Stepić’s article will appear in Porn Studies after peer-review, accompanied by an interview with Stepic about the article and his research more broadly. The SIG received excellent submissions this year and commends all the applicants on their compelling and diverse research. Once again, we congratulate Nikola Stepić on his intellectually imaginative, rigorously researched, and compelling article.