Cinema Studies
Faculty
Eric Ames
Eric Ames is Associate Professor of Germanics and a member of the Cinema Studies faculty. He teaches courses in all periods of German film history as well as core courses in Cinema Studies. His first book, "Carl Hagenbeck's Empire of Entertainments" (UW Press, 2009), explores the making of modern theme space, including the history of zoos, films, museums, panoramas, amusement parks, ethnographic exhibitions, and Wild West shows. Currently, he is writing a book on Werner Herzog and the documentary tradition.
Jennifer M. Bean
Jennifer M. Bean is Director of Cinema Studies, Associate Professor in Comparative Literature, and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women's Studies. She is co-editor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke UP, 2002), as well as a special issue of Camera Obscura on "Early Women Stars" (2001). She is the author of The Play in the Machine: Gender, Genre, and the Cinema of Modernity (forthcoming Duke UP), and is currently editing a collection on the origins of American film stardom for the Rutgers University Press "Star Decades" series. Her investment in silent-era film preservation and restoration agendas has led to her advisory work with the National Film Preservation Foundation; her voice-over on various restored films from the early period of cinema can be heard on two DVD-anthologies, More Treasures from The Film Archives (2004), and Treasures III: Social Issues in Early American Cinema (2007). Her current book project focuses on early comedy and modern theories of laughter. She recently contributed commentary for a BBC-2 radio documentary, Smile: The Genius of Charlie Chaplin (narrated by Robert Downery Jr.) and participated in New York Public Radio's "American Icon" series, in a segment titled "Chaplin's Tramp." At the University of Washington, she teaches courses in film theory, genre, analysis, and history.
Yomi Braester
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University (1997)
Professor Braester’s research focuses on modern China and Taiwan and ranges from literary and film history to analysis of visual practices—in architecture, advertisement, screen media, and stage arts. He is committed to locating literary and visual texts within larger cultural matrices and comparative contexts. His work is guided by a persistent concern with how texts and images form and manipulate our perception of history. His books include Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China (Stanford UP, 2003), Painting the City Red: Film and Theater as Agents of Chinese Urban Policy, from 1949 to the 2008 Olympics (Duke UP, forthcoming), and the edited volume Cinema at the City’s Edge: Film and Urban Space in East Asia (co-edited with James Tweedie; Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, forthcoming).
Professor Braester is the founder and director of the UW Summer Program in Chinese Film History and Criticism at the Beijing Film Academy.
Personal web page: http://faculty.washington.edu/yomi
Claudia Gorbman
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--Emeritus
Wiilis 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.
Albert Sbragia
Albert Sbragia arrived at the University of Washington in 1989. He is the Chair of French and Italian Studies, 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.
Cynthia Steele
Cynthia Steele is Professor of Comparative Literature, a member of the Cinema Studies faculty, and Chair of the Department. She teaches courses in Latin American film and narrative, as well as on the history of film and film noir. Her first two books were /Narrativa indigenista en los Estados Unidos y México/ and /Politics, Gender and the Mexican Novel, 1968-1988/. At present she is writing a book about literature from Chiapas, including Mayan authors, photographers and filmmakers. Recently she has begun working on Central American narrative and on the Latin American narconovela, as well as on New Argentinean and Mexican Cinemas. She has also translated Mexican fiction and poetry, including works by Inés Arredondo, Elena Poniatowska, and José Emilio Pacheco.
James Tweedie
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.