Council Biography

Summary of Curriculum Vitae

Academic Positions:

Professor, Cinema, San Francisco State University, 1987-present.

Visiting Professor, Critical Studies, School of Film, UCLA, 1998; Theater Arts, UC Santa Cruz, 1990-93.

Faculty member (Lecturer - Full Professor), Queen's University, 1974-1987.

Other Visiting Professorships: Research Associate, Art History and Visual Culture, 1996-97, History of Consciousness, 1985, UC Santa Cruz; National Humanities Institute, Canberra, Australia, 1989; UC Berkeley, 1980-81; Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, 1978.

Administrative Positions:

Chair, Department of Cinema, SF State University, 1987-1990; Director, Graduate Studies, 1993-present; Chair, Hiring, Promotion and Tenure Committee, SF State, 1993-95.

President, Society for Cinema Studies, 1983-85; Past President, 1985-87.

Head of Department, Film Studies, Queen's University, 1978-1985.

Acting Head of Department, Film Studies, Queen's University, 1976-78.

Coordinator, First Soviet-American Film Scholars Conference, Moscow, 1989.

President, Board of Directors, 1976-77, 1981-82, and co-founder, National Film Theater at Kingston, 1976 (a community-based cinematheque).

Consultant:

Guest Curator, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1996-98.

Advisor, thirteen-hour PBS/BBC series on American cinema produced by The New York Center for Visual History (aired in 1995).

Expert witness, (Arnold v. Fox Broadcasting), successfully settled out of court.

Senior Consultant, American Film Institute: developed comprehensive film education program for the United States; served as General Editor for the AFI Film Reader series, 1984-87.

External evaluator, Brown University, University of Colorado, and U.C. Santa Cruz.

Editorial consultant, Routledge, Oxford, Duke, MacMillan, Minnesota, Princeton, Indiana, University of California, and other presses.

Editorial board member: Visual Anthropology Review, Cinema Journal, Cine-tracts, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Literature and Medicine and other journals.

Juror, San Francisco International Film Festival; History and Film session, Sundance, 1995.

Books:

Six Books: Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture; Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary; Ideology and the Image; Newsreel: Film and Revolution on the American Left and the two-volume anthology, Movies and Methods (widely reviewed, volume one helped define modern film scholarship).

Books in progress: Editor: Maya Deren: Radical Aspirations (U.C. Press, 2001), Introduction to Documentary (Indiana U. Press, 2001), Social Representation and the Cinema.

Articles:

Over 70 published articles address topics from male subjectivity ("Sons at the Brink of Manhood: Utopian Moments in Male Subjectivity") to cybernetics ("The Work of Culture in the Age of Cybernetic Systems"), and from visual anthropology ("The Ethnographers Tale") to film theory ("Form Wars: The Political Unconscious of Formalist Theory").

Over 15 articles reprinted in anthologies.

Public Presentations:

Over 100 presentations, including "Style and Film," Copenhagen, Denmark; "Documentary Ethics," Augsburg, Germany; "The Most Important Art," Moscow, USSR; "Alfred Hitchcock and Narrative Cinema," a two-week lecture series, Beijing, China; "Cybernetic Culture," keynote address, first Nordic Film Conference, Turku, Finland; "The Gulf War Text," Yamagata Film Festival, Japan; "Documentary: A Fiction (Un)like Any Other," a seven-part lecture and film series, Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, Australia.

Public Service:

Film Critic, KUSP-FM, National Public Radio. Occasional commentator on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Numerous film and book reviews.

Co-founder, National Film Theater at Kingston (a public cinematheque), 1976; Ontario Filmmaker's Cooperative, Kingston, Ontario (for independent film and video artists), 1980.

Advisor, Redevelopment Director, Santa Cruz (on film exhibition issues affecting downtown redevelopment following the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989).

Individual Grants and Fellowships:

Social Science and Humanities Research Council: 1) Three-year grant for research on postwar American culture, with matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. 2) Multiple grants for the development of film study resources at Queen's University.

National Endowment for the Humanities: Research Fellowship, 1990-91 and Summer Stipend, 1989, for work on Representing Reality.

Principal's Development Fund, Queen's University, for various initiatives in visual anthropology and collaborative research with the Department of Sociology.

Teaching:

Favorite Professor Award, UC Santa Cruz, 1992 and 1993.

Nominated for Alumni Teaching Award, Queen's University, 1985.

Courses taught: film theory; postmodern theory; formalism and Marxism; women and film; film history; visual culture; visual anthropology; national cinemas; documentary film; culture and technology; silent cinema; postwar American culture; independent American cinema; genre film; film noir; cultural theory; graduate seminars on Roland Barthes; Karl Marx; Sigmund Freud; Michel Foucault; Hayden White; narrative theory; Soviet constructivism; Hitchcock; theories of montage/collage; historiography; research methodology.

Other:

Co-founder: Queen's Film Archives, 1978 (a study collection and National Film Board depository).

Film and video production experience as producer and director.

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