Miriam Hansen
Office: Wieboldt 403
Email: mhansen@uchicago.edu
Professor, Department of English Language & Literature, Committee on Cinema & Media Studies, and the College
Background:
My background is in English and American Literature. I got my degree at the University of Frankfort in Germany. I also studied Philosophy and Political Theory. A long-standing focus of my work concerns reflections on film and mass culture in the context of the Frankfurt School, in particular by writers such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and writer/filmmaker Alexander Kluge. Then after I completed my dissertation in 1975, I came over in 1977 and did my postdoc at Yale in American Studies. After a year I decided I wanted to stay. At that point I began teaching film. I taught film there, at the undergraduate program, for 5 years. Then in 1982 I went to Reuters and taught in the English Department. I came to the University of Chicago in 1990, after having already gone to Germany in '89 to do research on a project that is still with me. It is a book on Film Theory of the Frankfurt School, which I believe is a misnomer. My project has turned more and more into a project about German Jewish Film Theory. There are three exemplary writers, which I have mentioned, and their relationship to film and mediation and image making as examples. My work goes into a somewhat different direction, so that is more or less my connection to Jewish Studies and I have been writing on Benjamin and teaching Benjamin since 1986. I also wrote a piece on Schindler's List entitled "Schindler's List Is Not Shoah."
What type of student would benefit working with you:
Well I think what students can learn from me is to read certain texts from a German Jewish tradition. What students can also learn from me is that before they can work on any film format, or culture related topic, that they first have to learn something about how film works. If someone were to apply to the program, to the graduate program, and was interested in doing a dissertation on anything related to film whether it would be Israeli cinema or the diaspora in film or film exile, whatever, I would say before you do anything, take a course with me on Media Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies. There they take methods, study major debates and theoretical position, and methodological approaches. And there are tons of people who write about Jewish topics and film and very few people really know how to talk about this in ways that are interesting.
What are you teaching now:
In the Winter I will be teaching a graduate Ph.D. seminary on the notion of cinema as vernacular modernism. In the Spring I will be teaching an undergraduate course in the Frankfort school and film theory.
What do you recommend graduate students who are not students of film, but want to speak intelligibly about film inside their work, do:
I would recommend taking a course that is taught on a regular basis called Methods and Issues. And I do occasionally teach Ph.D. seminars on Benjamin.