"Collecting and Recollecting: Battlestar Galactica Through Video’s Varied Technologies of Memory,” Professor Caetlin Benson-Allott (Georgetown University). It argues that although video is variously understood as a technology of memory and a technology of access, video is not just one technology, and the differences between its formats affect viewers’ interpretations of television history and through it US history. To elucidate this argument, Professor Benson-Allott turns to a legacy television program that has appeared on every major video platform thus far: Battlestar Galactica (ABC, 1978-1979). Its pilot offers potent—and popular—analogical criticism of Cold War diplomacy, an intervention that came to the fore when the broadcast was interrupted by a newsflash on the signing of the Camp David Peace Accords. Off-the-air recording facilitates speculations about this historical coincidence, yet prerecorded videocassettes downplay their content’s televisual origins to reconstruct episodes as stand-alone commodities. DVD and Blu-ray season box sets frame their offerings in auteurist supplements that foreground televisuality but obscure labor and history, while streaming and sell-through media encourage transient viewing practices that emphasize the commensurability of all video content. In sum, the different video technologies offer consumers different perspectives on television’s historical value. Video technologies as constructed by commercial distributors change what we value when we value television, meaning both television technology and television programming. Caetlin Benson-Allott is Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of English and Film and Media Studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens: Video Spectatorship from VHS to File Sharing (2013) and Remote Control (2015). She is a regular columnist and Contributing Editor at Film Quarterly and the Editor of Cinema Journal. This lecture is a part of the Cinema and Media Studies Lecture Series.