Jeffery Harder, MFA

Associate Professor

Jeff Harder, an associate professor with the School of Communication, has been teaching at Loyola for over 20 years. During his tenure at Loyola Harder has helped develop the content for many of the film and production courses offered by the school including: film genre analysis, radio production, and video production.

Harder teaches Topics in Film History and Film Genre, Intro to Cinema, Film Production, Directing for the Screen and Digital Cinema Production, which will be offered in Spring 2012 for the first time.

In July 2007 Harder traveled to Jajce, Bosnia-Herzegovina, to help found the Jajce Media Project and help teach video production to the young people in the program. The town of Jajce is located in the mountainous central region of Bosnia-Herzegovina, not far from important urban centers, such as Banja Luka, Sarajevo and Zagreb.

Education

MFA,  Ohio University's Department of Film and Video, Athens, Ohio.

Research Interests

Harder has shot, edited and directed over 18 films and videos. One project, co-produced with several other Loyola faculty including, Bren Murphy, was A College of Their Own: A History of Higher Education for Women in the United States. The documentary focused on Mundelein College, the last all-women's college in Illinois, which is now merged into Loyola. The 54-minute documentary competed and screened at four academic conferences (NCA, OSCLG, AJCU-C, Gaudy Night Conference on Women's Colleges) and one film festival (Women in the Director's Chair). Harder also was co-recipient of a grant from the University of Wisconsin for the Soviet Veterans Video and Oral History Project, a documentary video project focusing on interviews of Russian veterans of World War II who live in the Chicago area.

Along with Nick Ceh, Harder co-authored Imagining A Croatian Nation, East European Quarterly and co-edited with Ceh 23 hours of hours of interviews with Bosnian and Croatian concentration camp survivors, militiamen, university students, intellectuals, and refugees for The Gold Apple: War and Democracy in Croatia and Bosnia, published by Columbia University Press.

Harder has in production Motorcycle Cultures. When completed, the taped material will be used to produce three separate video documentaries about motorcycle culture in the Midwest.

Courses Taught

Topics in Film History and Film Genre, Intro to Cinema, Film Production, Directing for the Screen and Digital Cinema Production, which will be offered in Spring 2012 for the first time.