B I O G R A P H Y . B I O G R A P H Y . B I O G R A P H Y
Professor at the University of Amsterdam, and Chair of the Department of Film and Television Studies (1991-2001), now Research Professor, Department of Media and Culture
Professor II at the University of Bergen, Norway, Department of Media Studies (1993-1999)
Professor Associate at the Hochschule für Gestaltung and ZKM, Karlsruhe (since 1997)
_____________________________________________________
Born in Berlin, 1943. Educated at the University of Sussex (U.K.), where he received a B.A. in English Literature in 1966, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature in 1971. After working as a film critic in London and editing the international film journal Monogram, he was appointed to teach European Romanticism and Literary Modernism at the University of East Anglia in 1972. In 1976 he initiated Film Studies at the University of East Anglia, chaired Film Studies until 1986, and was in charge of the Master's and Ph.D. programme in Cinema from 1980 to 1991. Appointed to the University of Amsterdam to build up an undergraduate and graduate programme in Film and Television Studies (the first in The Netherlands), he was from 1991-2001 the Chair of the Department of Film and Television Studies, which now has approx. 1200 students majoring in Film, TV and Digital Media. He was also during that period director of a one-year international M.A. Programme in Visual Culture. Since 2001 he is Research Professor, and responsible for a PhD Programme ‘Cinema Europe’, offered in conjunction with ASCA, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, of which he is a Founding and Executive Board Member. He is also General Editor of the series Film Culture in Transition, published by Amsterdam University Press. Twenty volumes have so far appeared under his editorship.
His essays on film theory, film genre, film history and television have appeared in well over two hundred collections and anthologies, with essays translated into in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian, Czech, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. He lectures widely in the USA, Canada, Italy, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Norway, France, Austria and the Far East. Since 1975 he has held positions as Visiting Professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, at the University of Iowa, the Free University Berlin and at Hamburg University. He was a permanent visiting professor at the University of Bergen, is a professor associate at the Centre of Media Arts in Karlsruhe, and held visiting research fellowships at the University of Vienna during the Fall Semester 1994/95 and the University of California, Berkeley from January to April 1998. He was a Visiting Associate at New York University (Jan-May 2001), a Visiting Professor at the FU Berlin (April-Sept 2002), a Senior Research Fellow at the IFK Vienna (Sept-Jan 2003-4) and Distinguished Fellow at the Sackler Institute, Tel Aviv University (March-June 2004).
His books as author include New German Cinema: A History (London: Macmillan and New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989, reprinted 1994) which received the Jay Leyda Prize (NYU) and the Kovacs Book Award (SCMS), Fassbinder's Germany: History Identity Subject (Amsterdam: AUP, 1996), Weimar Cinema and After (London/ New York: Routledge, 2000 [winner of the Kovacs Book Award of SCMS]), Metropolis (London: BFI, 2000), (with W.Buckland) Studying Contemporary American Film (London/NY, 2002) and Filmgeschichte und Frühes Kino (Munich, 2002).
He has published in American Film, Cinetracts, Discourse, Framework, Hors Cadre, Iris, Kinoschriften, Medienwissenschaft, montage a/v, New German Critique, October, Persistence of Vision, Positif, Screen, Sight and Sound, Trafic, Wide Angle and many other journals.