habil. Ágnes PETHŐ, PhD

Education Doctoral studies Doctoral schools Doctoral School of Film and Intermedial Studies Doctoral supervisors habil. Ágnes PETHŐ, PhD

Professor

Ágnes Pethő is Full Professor of Film Studies at the Film, Photography and Media Department of the Faculty of Sciences and Arts in Cluj-Napoca, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, with habilitation in the field of Film and Media Studies. The major focus of her research work is the relationship between film and the other arts, the theory and analysis of the intermediality of moving images, as well as the intermedial aesthetics of modernist and postmodernist cinema, the confluences between cinema and contemporary visual arts. Her relevant books in this field are: Múzsák tükre. Az intermedialitás és az önreflexió poétikája a filmben [Mirror of the Muses. The Poetics of Intermediality and Self-Reflexivity in Film, 2003, in Hungarian], Cinema and Intermediality: The Passion for the In-Between (2011, expanded with additional chapters in the revised second edition, published in 2020). She has published many articles and book chapters on topics related to cinematic intermediality. Some of her writings have also been translated into Portuguese, Polish, Russian and Chinese. Her most important edited books published in English include: Affective Intermediality. Moving Images Between Media, Sensation and Reality (2026), Caught In-Between. Intermediality in Eastern European and Russian Cinema (2020), The Cinema of Sensations (2015), Film in the Post-Media Age (2012), Words and Images on the Screen (2008). She is the executive editor of the journal Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies published by Springer Nature, a scholarly journal that frequently runs special issues of interest for intermedial studies. She has also led several research projects investigating the figurations of intermediality in Central and Eastern European films, the changing forms of cinematic in-betweenness in the digital age, and the affective performativity of intermediality in contemporary cinema. She has been the convenor of several international film and media studies conferences at the Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania. In 2025, she received the Arany János Award for Excellence in Scientific Research from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, awarded for her “outstanding achievements in the field of film and media studies, her pioneering work in the research of intermediality in cinema.”