About the Program
Course Offerings
Faculty
Events in Cinema
Resources
CINEMA STUDIES FACULTY

Albert Sbragia arrived at the University of Washington in 1989. He is an Associate Professor of Italian Studies, director of the Cinema Studies program in the Department of Comparative Literature, and a faculty member of the European Studies program. His publications include a book, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic (University Press of Florida, 1996), and publications on 19th Century and 20th Century Italian literature and culture. His current research project is entitled "Modernity in Rome" and deals with urbanistic, literary, and visual constructions of the Italian capital from 1870 to the present. He is also the director of the Italian Studies program at the UW Center in Rome.
Jennifer Bean comes to us from the University of Texas-Austin where she taught courses in contemporary cinema, film genre and film history. Over the past several years she has served as editor for "The Velvet Light Trap: An International Journal of Film History" as well as Artistic Director for the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival. Though she confesses to an interest in a wide variety of film styles and forms, her specialty is in the "silent" era and she works in tandem with the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) to promote awareness of early film preservation agendas. She is currently at work on her book, Bodies in Shock: Gender, Genre and the Cinema of Modernity, 1912-1924.
Yomi Braester is interested in bringing together critical analysis and historical inquiry into research on literature, film, and visual culture in twentieth-century China. His book Witness Against History: Literature, Film and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford University Press, 2003) argues that mainstream twentieth-century Chinese fiction and cinema belies the writers' and filmmakers' ostensible faith in historical progress and the viablity of free public debate. He is currently working on a book on the relationship between urban planning, staged spectacles, and filmic representation in China, since 1949 to the present, and is editing a volume on visual culture in modern China. Before coming to the UW in 2000, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at UC-Berkeley and was Director of the Chinese Language Program at the University of Georgia.
http://faculty.washington.edu/yomi
Claudia Gorbman is Professor of Film Studies in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program at UW's Tacoma campus. She holds a PhD in Romance languages and literature from UW. She taught film at Indiana University from 1979 to 1990; she spent a year as director of the Paris Film and Critical Studies Program and has also served as director of Indiana University's Film Studies program. She is the author of Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (1987) and approximately fifty articles, and the translator of several books. She is passionately interested in film music and film sound in general, women and film, and French film. Her courses range from American to world cinema, film theory and history, directors, genres, and movements.
Willis Konick is an associate professor in Comparative Literature. Willis teaches world literature courses, but now primarily teaches film. He joins Professor Bean in offering our introductory series, and also teaches courses in film history. His primary research was in the area of Russian literature; now he extends his research interests to film. Willis has followed the long and sometimes unhappy history of film studies at the University of Washington; our new program fills him with great joy.
Cynthia Steele, Professor of Comparative Literature, Adjunct Professor of Women Studies and Director of the Theory and Criticism Program, specializes in contemporary Latin American, especially Mexican, culture. She teaches courses in Latin American Cinema, Mexican Cinema, The US-Mexico Border in Film and Literature, Cinema and Globalization in Spain and Mexico, and Luis Buñuel, as well as more general cinema and literature courses. She has recently published an article on gender and globalization in the cinema of Mexican director María Novaro, and has presented a paper on Mexican director Arturo Ripstein. Her current book project examines collaborations between Mayas and non-Indians in late twentieth-century Chiapas, including literature, photography and video.
James Tweedie is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Cinema Studies faculty at the University of Washington. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, where he coordinated the Crossing Borders Initiative, an interdisciplinary program designed to facilitate the study of globalization in the humanities and social sciences. He has published essays in Cinema Journal, Screen, SubStance, and Twentieth Century Literature, and is currently completing a book on European cinema in the 1980s. He is also working on a comparative study of cinematic new waves from the late 1950s to the 1990s. At UW he teaches introductory courses on film analysis and theory, as well as upper-level and graduate courses on globalization and film, post-WWII film history, and modernist cinema. He received an A.B. with honors from Stanford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.