Americanist Faculty | The American Field | Department of English


Elizabeth Binggeli

Postdoctoral Instructor, Department of English
Cinema and Media Studies

Office: Rosenwald 415D
Phone: (773) 702-0513
binggeli@uchicago.edu

My work focuses on intersections between American modernist literature and classical Hollywood cinema. In particular, I am interested in the ways historical film industry practice shaped both literary and cinematic narrative form. My current project centers on an analysis of Warner Bros. story department archival records documenting the review of novels by African American authors in the 1930s and 40s. I am also working on a study of silent film star Mary Pickford and the relation between juvenation, racialization and genre in her films.

Courses:

Graduate:  The Harlem Renaissance and Hollywood; Cinema Studies and the Archive; Writing White; Screening the Blacklist.

Undergraduate:  The Rhetorics of Studio Era Censorship; Queering the Text: Lesbian and Gay Literature in Film Adaptation; Mary Pickford and the American Film Industry.
Selected Publications:

  • “Worse than Bad: Sanctuary, the Hays Office and the Genre of Abjection,” Arizona Quarterly, Volume 65.4 (Winter 2009)

  • “Hollywood Wants a Cracker: Zora Neale Hurston and Studio Narrative Culture,” Reading Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Essays. Deborah G. Plant, ed. Prager, 2009.

  • “The Unadapted: Warner Bros. Reads Zora Neale Hurston,” Cinema Journal, Volume 48.3 (Spring 2009)

  • “Burbanking Bigger and Bette the Bitch,” African American Review, Volume 40.3 (Fall 2006)

Education:

Ph.D., University of Southern California, 2005.  Teaching at Chicago since 2008.

Department of English
The University of Chicago
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

© 2009 The University of Chicago
Last updated: May 2009

 

Americanist Faculty | The American Field | Department of English