Join us for a conversation between Peter B. Kaufman and Jonathan Brent on the release of Kaufman’s new book, The Moving Image, A User’s Manual (MIT Press 2025), the definitive guidebook for using video in modern communication.

The program will be followed by a reception and book signing with copies of The Moving Image available for purchase.

Registration is required for this event. Please use the link below to register.

About The Moving Image, A User’s Manual

Video is today's most popular information medium. Two-thirds of the world's internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information more often from screens and speakers than through any other means. The Moving Image is the first authoritative account of how we have arrived here, together with the first definitive manual to help writers, educators, and publishers use video more effectively. Drawing on decades as an educator, publisher, and producer, MIT's Peter Kaufman presents new tools, best practices, and community resources for integrating film and sound into media that matters.

Kaufman describes video's vital role in politics, law, education, and entertainment today, only 130 years since the birth of film. He explains how best to produce video, distribute it, clear rights to it, cite it, and, ultimately, archive and preserve it. With detailed guidance on producing and deploying video and sound for publication, finding and using archival video and sound, securing rights and permissions, developing distribution strategies, and addressing questions about citation, preservation, and storage—across the broadest spectrum of platforms, publications, disciplines, and formats—The Moving Image equips readers for the medium's continued ascendance in education, publishing, and knowledge dissemination in the decades to come. And, modeled in part on Strunk and White's classic, The Elements of Style, it's also a highly enjoyable read.

“Indispensable. A groundbreaking guide to navigating video as today’s dominant medium.”
~Allissa V. Richardson, author of Bearing Witness While Black

“A work of genius. The book tells us how to preserve, protect, and curate the moving image as an integral part of fighting back against our current epistemic implosion.”
~Lee McIntyre, author of On Disinformation

“This visionary work is an essential, authoritative, and entertaining companion for makers, authors, and scholars that will help them produce, deploy, and quote moving images with fluency and integrity.”
~Rick Prelinger, archivist and Emeritus Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz

“At a time when video has become the dominant medium of communication, Kaufman provides a much-needed primer for scholars and practitioners alike.”
~Sandra Ristovska, author of Seeing Human Rights

Peter B. Kaufman is Senior Program Officer at MIT Open Learning. Educated at Cornell and Columbia, he is the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world. He has served as Associate Director of Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning; co-chair of the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank; co-chair of the Copyright Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists; a member of the Scholar Advisory Committee of WGBH’s American Archive of Public Broadcasting; a member of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences; and a long-time consultant to the Library of Congress’s Packard Campus for Audiovisual Conservation.

Jonathan Brent is a historian, publisher, translator, writer, and teacher. For eighteen years (1991-2009) he was Humanities Senior Editor and then Editorial Director at Yale University Press where he established the Annals of Communism series. His books include Stalin’s Last Crime (2003); and Inside the Stalin Archives (2008). Brent has translated poems of Joseph Brodsky and Vladimir Mayakovsky and teaches history and literature at Bard College. He is currently writing a study of Stalin’s seizure of power and finishing a novel. In 2009, Brent became Executive Director and CEO of The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Brent has made three documentaries about his work: Stalin’s Last Plot (2009); Stalin: Man of Steel (2003); Declassified: Stalin (2006); and How to Become a Tyrant (2021, Netflix).  His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Commentary, The American Scholar, The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and numerous other journals and newspapers.