Thomas Elsaesser
Lucy Fischer
Randall Halle
Birgit Hein
Rembert Hüser
Alice Kuzniar
Marcia Landy
Richard Langston
Adam Lowenstein
Vladimir Padunov
Reinhild Steingröver
Philip Watts

Thomas Elsaesser
University of Amsterdam

In 1976 Thomas 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 lecures 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.

Lucy Fischer
University of Pittsburgh

Lucy Fischer is a professor of film studies and English as well as director of the Film Studies Program. She is the author of seven books: Jacques Tati (G.K. Hall, 1983), Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema (Princeton, 1989), Imitation of Life (Rutgers, 1991), Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre (Princeton University Press, 1996), Sunrise (British Film Institute, 1998), Designing Women: Art Deco, Cinema and the Female Form (Columbia University Press, 2003), and Stars: The Film Reader (co-edited with Marcia Landy) Routledge, 2004.

She has published extensively on issues of film history, theory, and criticism in such journals as Screen, Sight and Sound, Camera Obscura, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal Journal of Film and Video, Film Criticism, Women and Performance, Frauen und Film, and Film Quarterly. Her essays have been anthologized 27 times in volumes of film history, criticism, and/or theory.

She has held curatorial positions at The Museum of Modern Art (New York City) and The Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), and has written catalog essays for exhibits at the Wight Gallery (Los Angeles) and the Neuberger Museum (Purchase, NY). She has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Art Critics Fellowship as well as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Professors.

Randall Halle
University of Pittsburgh

Randall Halle is the Klaus W. Jonas Professor of German and Film Studies. His work has appeared in Screen, Camera Obscura, New German Critique, German Quarterly, among others. He has written on popular culture, queer theory, film genre, transnationalism, European Cinema.

His books include Toward a Transnational Aesthetic: German Film after Germany. Champagne: University of Illinois Press: Spring 2008; After the Avant-garde: New Directions in Experimental Film. Co-edited with Reinhild Steingröver. Camden House Press, 2007; Queer Social Philosophy: Critical Readings from Kant to Adorno. Champagne: University of Illinois Press: 2004; Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective. Co-edited with Maggie McCarthy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press: 2003.

For his research he has received grants from the SSRC, The NEH, and the DAAD.

Birgit Hein
Academy of Fine Arts Braunschwieg

Birgit Hein is a University Professor in the Institute for Media Research. She is also one of Germany’s most significant experimental filmmakers. Further, many of Germany’s new generation of experimental visual artists have developed their skills in Birgit’s workshop. In 1966 Birgit began a long-term collaboration with Wilhelm Hein, making several films, then undertaking performances and installations. She was also one of the founders of XSCREEN in Cologne, an exhibition space providing a stage for subcultures. Her work there resulted in police raids and censorship. She has led the way in Materialist, Underground, and Feminist experimental filmmaking. She has traveled and exhibited her work throughout Europe, the US and Canada, South Asia, and China. She is also the author of one of the first studies of experimental film, Film in Underground.

Rembert Hüser
University of Minnesota

Rembert Hüser is an associate professor in the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch. His interests include Cultural studies, film and media studies, literary criticism. From 1999-2001 he held a research position at the Center for the Research of Media and Cultural Communication at the University of Cologne.

His book, Hitchcock: The First Three Minutes, is forthcoming. Hüser's study analyses the title sequences of Hitchcock's American films, showing how a variety of visual and acoustic experimental techniques employed in these sequences produce a particular mode of enunciation destined to frame the film within its own self-interpretation.

He has written numerous articles on experimental film and conducted significant and incisive interviews with contemporary experimental filmmakers.

Alice Kuzniar
University of North Carolina— Chapel Hill

Alice Kuzniar is professor of German and Comparative Literature. Her interests are expansive, ranging from film, literature, and philosophy, to canine-relations. Her essays have appeared in Film Criticism, Film Quarterly, the PMLA, Modern Austrian Literature, The Germanic Review, Seminar, among others. Her work also appears in numerous collections and anthologies.

Her books include Melancholia's Dog ( University of Chicago Press, 2006), The Queer German Cinema. Stanford University Press, Spring 2000; and Ed. Outing Goethe and His Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. In each of these she has broke new ground and established new paradigms of scholarship.

She has received many grants and fellowships including the prestigious Humboldt Fellowship, a DAAD stipend, and the Williamson Bequest Grant in Gay and Lesbian Studies.

Marcia Landy
University of Pittsburgh

Marcia Landy is Distinguished Service Professor of English/Film Studies with a secondary appointment in the Department of French and Italian Languages and Literatures. She teaches courses on film genres, film directors (e.g., Pasolini and Rossellini), national cinemas (e.g., British and Italian), film history and theory, cinema and the transnational, melodrama, and politics and film.

Her articles on film have appeared in Screen, Post Script, Jump Cut, Cinema Journal, Ñew German Critique, Critical Quarterly, Journal of Film and Video, Cine-Tracts, boundary 2, and in anthologies.

Her books include Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema, 1929–1943; Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and Television Melodrama; British Genres; Cinema and Society, 1930–1960; Cultures, Politics and the Writings of Antonio Gramsci; Queen Christina (with Amy Villarejo); Cinematic Uses of the Past, and The Folklore of Consensus: Theatricality in the Italian Cinema, 1930–1945, Italian Film, and The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media.

Richard Langston
University of North Carolina— Chapel Hill

Dick Langston is an assistant professor in the Department of German. His work is highly interdisciplinary and engages literature, the visual arts, cinema, theater, television, and audio recordings.

His first book-length project is entitled "Visions of Violence: German Avant-Gardes after Fascism" and advances a theory of postwar avant-gardes as well as a history of its execution in the Bonn and Berlin Republics. He has significant articles in German Quarterly, Modernity/Modernism, the Women in German Yearbook, among others.

Adam Lowenstein
University of Pittsburgh

Adam Lowenstein is associate professor of English and Film Studies. He works on issues relating to the cinema as a mode of historical, cultural, and aesthetic confrontation. His teaching and research link these issues to the relays between genre films and art films, the construction of national cinemas, and the politics of spectatorship, with particular attention to American, British, Canadian, French, and Japanese cases.

He is the author of Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia University Press, 2005). His essays have appeared in Cinema Journal, Critical Quarterly, and Post Script, as well as the anthologies Hitchcock: Past and Future (ed. Richard Allen and Sam Ishii-Gonzáles, 2004), Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (ed. E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, 2004) and British Cinema, Past and Present (ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson, 2000). He is an interviewed scholar in The American Nightmare (2000), a documentary investigation of 1960's and 1970's American horror films directed by Adam Simon and co-produced by Colin MacCabe for The Independent Film Channel.

Vladimir Padunov
University of Pittsburgh

Vladimir Padunov is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and is currently serving as the associate director of the Film Studies Program.

He is the deputy editor of Kinokultura, an electronic journal on the contemporary Russian film industry, and co-editor of Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, a journal published by Intellect Books.

Together with Nancy Condee, he directed the Working Group on Contemporary Russian Culture (1990-93), supported by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council. His work has been published in the US (The Nation, October, WideAngle), the UK (Framework, New Left Review, New Formations), and Russia (Voprosy literatury, Znamia, Iskusstvo kino). His areas of research include Russian visual culture, narrative history and theory, film history.

His recent publications include "Swan Song: The Sad Fate of Gregory Ratoff's Song of Russia (1944)" in KinoForum 1, 2006; "Storing and Restoring History: Gosfil'mofond and the Tenth Belye Stolby Archival Film Festival" (2006), "Imperial Acorn —> National Oaks: The Eighth KinoForum" (2005), and "Stars Above Almaty: Kazakh Cinema Between 1998 and 2003" (2004), all in KinoKultura; "Views of the Present As Visions of the Past," Iskusstvo kino 10, 1996; "'Large Loose Baggy Monsters': The Poetics of Excess in Contemporary Russian Culture" in Russian Literature of the XX Century: Directions and Tendencies (Ekaterinburg: Ural State Pedagogical University, 1996); "History and Identity in Recent Russian Cinema" in Beyond Perestroika: Jews and History in the Global Village (NY: The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, 1995); "Makulakul'tura" and "Perestroika Suicide: Not by bred Alone," with Nancy Condee, Russian Culture in Transition (Stanford Slavic Studies, 1993).

Every May, since 1999, he has directed the annual Russian Film Symposium in Pittsburgh.

Reinhild Steingröver
Eastman School of Music/ University of Rochester

Reinhild Steingröver is associate professor in the Humanities Department at the Eastman School of Music. Her main teaching and research interests focus on contemporary German and Austrian film and literature, in particular the intersection of art and politics and the role of the artist in society.

Steingröver is the author of a monograph on Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, Einerseits und Andererseits, Essays zur Prosa Thomas Bernhards. New York: Peter Lang, 2000) and the editor of the anthology Not So Plain As Black and White: Afro-German History and Culture 1890-2000 (with Professor Patricia Mazón, State University of New York at Buffalo), which was published by the University of Rochester Press in 2005. She is currently writing a book on the last generation of film directors of the East German state-run film studio DEFA, entitled Last Features: DEFA's Lost Generation, 1990-92 and editing the volume After the Avant-garde: Engagements with Contemporary German and Austrian Experimental Film.

In addition she has published numerous articles and translations in Germany, the UK, Canada and the United States, where she has also lectured extensively. Steingröver received many grants for research in Austria and Germany, including several from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Suhrkamp Foundation, the State University of New York at Buffalo and the University of Rochester.

Phillip Watts
University of Pittsburgh

Phillip Watts is an assistant professor of French and Italian languages and literatures. His areas of expertise are postwar French cinema, Algerian literature, and the history of literary forms.

His book Allegories of the Purge (Stanford, 1998) received the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for French and Francophone Studies. His numerous essays have appeared Critique, South Atlantic Quarterly, SubStance, among others.

He received the Howard Foundation Fellowship and an NEH stipend.