Faculty/Staff

Mark Lynn Anderson

Mark Lynn Anderson received his MA in English and PhD (2000) in Film Studies from the University of Rochester. Before joining the Film Studies faculty at the University of Pittsburgh he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communications at Florida Atlantic University.

His book, Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920's America, is forthcoming from the University of California Press. His current project is a critical biography of one of Hollywood’s first women film producers, Dorothy Davenport Reid. He has also published (or has forthcoming) chapters in Inventing Film Studies (on the Payne Fund Studies), In the Absence of Film: Towards a New Historiographic Practice (on Clara Smith Hamon) and Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal (on Wallace Reid).

Twilight of the Idols argues that the early Hollywood star system was instrumental in transforming the popular understanding of personality and sexual definition in the U.S. The book is about the cinema’s alignment with the emerging human sciences (anthropology, psychology, sociology); it uses the "deviant stars" of the 1920's to think about the way star culture both participated in and accommodated itself to popular scientific ideas about personality, developmental processes, and modern society.

Anderson has taught a variety of courses in film, film history and theory, queer cinema, media and photography. He was the Assistant Programmer for the Motion Picture Collections at the George Eastman House. His awards include the SCS dissertation award, the Larry J. Hackman Research Residency Award from New York State Archives, a research grant from the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Edwin S. Curtis Fellowship in Film Studies at the University of Rochester.

His email address is andersml@pitt.edu.

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