[Department Members][Cinema Media Studies][Resource Faculty]






Miriam Bratu Hansen

Professor, Department of English Language & Literature, Department of Cinema & Media Studies, and the College










Dr. Phil., J. W. Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany, 1975

Miriam Hansen is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities.

My research and teaching interests traverse various areas and periods in the history of cinema (including American, German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese); classical and contemporary film theory; debates on mass-mediated publicness, modernism, and modernity; questions of film and media aesthetics; and approaches to transnational film history. In addition to a book based on my dissertation on Ezra Pound, I have published Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991), which examines the historical dynamics between the invention of a textually and institutionally constructed spectator and the cinema as a new type of public sphere. A long-standing focus of my work concerns reflections on film and mass culture in the (wider) context of the Frankfurt School, in particular by writers such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and writer/filmmaker Alexander Kluge (*English 687 / CMS 675).

More recently, I have been exploring the notion of cinema as a form of "vernacular modernism," as a heuristic lens and relational framework for transnational film history (*Eng 58700 / CMS 67300). This project evolved in part from my work on Kracauer and Benjamin, in part from a course (team-taught with Bill Brown) on "Modernity and the Sense of Things" (*Eng 292/692 / CMS 274). A related interest concerns the work of exile directors in Hollywood (in particular Paul Fejos, Max Ophuls, and Billy Wilder) and their aesthetic/ethnographic critique of American society and the culture industry. I have taught -- and plan to teach again -- a seminar on the cinema of Max Ophuls (*Eng 28101/38101, CMS 26500/36500) which looked at his oeuvre in terms of narration and style; experimental sound; cinematic movement and aesthetic affect; point of view, irony, and temporality; the genre of the "woman's film"; erotic passion and social forms; the critique of gender relations and gendered forms of spectacle and consumption; the place of international and diasporic filmmaking in film history.

Selected Publications:
  • "Benjamin's Aura: The Resurrection of a Concept." Forthcoming, Critical Inquiry.

  • "Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale." In: N. Durovicova, K. Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Forthcoming, New York, London: Routledge, 2007.

  • "Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors: Potemkin and German Film Theory." New German Critique 96 (Spring 2006): 101-118.

  • "'A Self-Representation of the Masses': Siegfried Kracauer's Curious Americanism." Forthcoming in: Kerstin Barndt, Kathleen Canning, and Kristin McGuire, eds., Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Publishers, 2006.

  • "Room-for-Play: Benjamin's Gamble with Cinema." October 109 (2004): 3-45.

  • "Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism." Film Quarterly 54.1 (Fall 2000): 10-22.

  • "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism." Modernism / Modernity 6.2 (April 1999): 59-77; also in: Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 2000).

  • "Introduction." Siegfried Kracauer. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. vii-xlv.

  • "Foreword." Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience. Tr. Peter Labanyi & Jamie Owen Daniel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ix-xli.

  • "Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Permutations of the Public Sphere." Screen 34.3 (Autumn 1993): 197-210; rpt. in Linda Williams, ed. Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. 134-152.

  • "Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer." New German Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992): 43-73; most recently rpt. in: Nigel Gibson & Andrew Rubin, eds. Adorno: A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass. & Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002.

  • "Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship." Cinema Journal 25.4 (Summer 1986): 6-32 [expanded in chs. 11 & 12 of Babel and Babylon].


    • Contact Information:
    Department of English
    The University of Chicago
    1115 East 58th Street
    Chicago, IL 60637
    Office (773) 702-8028
    Fax (773) 702-2495
    mhansen@uchicago.edu


    [Department Members][Cinema Media Studies][Resource Faculty]
    August 18, 2006