Loyola University Chicago

Faculty and Staff

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. He has also helped develop several new course offerings of which he is currently teaching Cinematography and Experimental Media Production, along with Intro to Cinema, Intro to Video Production, Film Production, and Film Genre. He also introduced Ethnographic Video Production, Vampire Cinema: A Cultural Approach to Mythic Narratives, European New Wave Cinema, and Chinese Cinema.

From 2005 to 2007 Harder also was program director for the new International Film and Media Studies program.

He received his MFA from Ohio University's Department of Film and Video, Athens, Ohio.

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 aslo 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.

Presently, 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.

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.  

Harder and two film students in Jajce, Bosnia-Herzegovina.