People - Faculty - Bean
Jennifer M. Bean
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies
Areas of Study: film and media studies, modernism/modernity, theories of gender and sexuality
Education: PhD, University of Texas-Austin, 1998.
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.