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Miriam Bratu Hansen

Miriam Bratu Hansen

Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities
Professor, Departments of English, Cinema and Media Studies, and the College

Office: Wieboldt 403
mhansen@uchicago.edu

My research and teaching interests focus on the history of American cinema, theories of mass culture and modernity (including debates on “Americanism”), film and media aesthetics, and the interrelations between cinematic modernism and modernist and avant-garde practices in the traditional arts. 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. I have written articles on a wide range of topics, including German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese cinemas, and issues in film and media theory. A related focus of my work is on debates on film in the wider context of the Frankfurt School, in particular writers such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and filmmaker/writer Alexander Kluge.


Siegfried Kracauer

I also have been teaching and writing about the notion of cinema as a form of “vernacular modernism,” exploring that concept in both its historical and transnational dimensions (Eng 587 / CMST 673). This project evolved in part from my earlier work on literary and artistic modernism, in part from a course (team-taught with Bill Brown) on “Modernity and the Sense of Things” (Eng 292/692 / CMST 274). A related project focuses on the work of exile directors in Hollywood (Max Ophuls, Paul Fejos, Billy Wilder) and their aesthetic-ethnographic critique of American society and the culture industry. More recently, I have been writing on how the cinema has been reframed by changes in the organization of sensory perception, experience, and publicness induced by digital technologies; the fate of cinema in the allegedly “post-cinematic” age is the subject of a PhD seminar I’ll be teaching in 2009-2010, as well as a visiting lecture series in preparation.
Courses:

Graduate: Cinema as Vernacular Modernism; The Films of Max Ophuls; Frankfurt School on Cinema, Modernity, and Mass Culture; Cinema/Post-Cinema.

Undergraduate: Film Aesthetics; Spectatorship and Cinema Experience; The Frankfurt School, Cinema, Modernity; American Cinema since 1960.


Selected Publications:
  • The Other Frankfurt School: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno on Cinema, Mass Culture, and Modernity. Forthcoming, 2010.
  • Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Harvard UP, 1991; 1994).
  • “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale.” In: N. Durovicova, K. Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Forthcoming, New York, London: Routledge, 2009.
  • “Benjamin’s Aura.” Critical Inquiry 34.2 (Winter 2008): 336-375.
  • “The Gender of Vernacular Modernism: Chinese and Japanese Films of the 1930s.” La Valle de l’Eden (Turin) IX.19 (Dec. 2007): 23-41.
  • “Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors: Potemkin and German Film Theory.” New German Critique 96 (Spring 2006): 101-118.
  • “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 3-45.
  • “Why Media Aesthetics?” Critical Inquiry Symposium 2003. Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004): 391-95.
  • “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism.” Modernism / Modernity 6.2 (April 1999): 59-77.
  • “Introduction.” Siegfried Kracauer. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. vii-xlv.
  • “Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism and Public Memory.” Critical Inquiry 22.2 (Winter 1996): 292-312.
  • “America, Paris, The Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity.” In: Leo Charney, Vanessa Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. 362-402.
  • “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.
  • “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship.” Cinema Journal 25.4 (Summer 1986): 6-32.

Education:
D. Phil. (English and American Literature), Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, 1975.  Teaching at Chicago since 1990.

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

© 2009 The University of Chicago
Last updated: May 2009


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