Leslie Fishbein is Associate Professor of American Studies, and one of the founding faculty members of the Cinema Studies Program at Rutgers. She has been a member of the Columbia Seminar on Film and Interdisciplinary Expression and has served on the Editorial Board of Film & History. She has presented papers on film and history at the annual conventions of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, and the National Women’s Studies Association and lectured on film throughout Israel during her 1986-1987 tenure as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the University of Haifa. Professor Fishbein has published in such scholarly journals as American Quarterly, New York History, Film Historia, Prospects: An Annual Journal of American Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, Film & History, Labor History, The Journal of Popular Film and Television, and American Studies. She is at work on a book entitled Memoirs of the Sex Trade: A Cultural History of Prostitution that examines both the filmic image of prostitutes and their own efforts at self-representation in documentary form.

Professor Fishbein's webpage

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Nicole Fleetwood is Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies at Rutgers University. She researches and teaches in the areas of visual culture, technology studies, gender theory, and race and representation. Her articles appear in American Quarterly, Signs, Social Text, tdr: the journal of performance studies, and edited anthologies. Her forthcoming book Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness will be published by the University of Chicago Press in fall 2010. She has worked as a consultant and has collaborated with a number of arts organizations and programs, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s Visual Knowledge Program, the Walker Art Center, Southern Exposure, Intersection for the Arts, and Youth Speaks. She is also a video producer and has worked on a number of documentaries.

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Sandy Flitterman-Lewis is Associate Professor of English and Film at Rutgers, where she teaches courses in Cinema Studies and Comparative Literature. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature (French, English and Italian) from the University of California at Berkeley. Her pioneering study of three French women directors (Germaine Dulac, Marie Epstein, and Agnès Varda), To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (1st edition, University of Illinois Press, 1990; 2nd edition, Columbia University Press, 1996), outlines the parameters of feminist film theory, a field defined in part by the journal Camera Obscura, for which she was a founding co-editor. She was also a founding coeditor of the cultural studies journal Discourse. She is co-author of New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics (Routledge 1992), which has been translated into four languages, and her essays are anthologized in 26 collections, including, for example, Documenting the Documentary, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, and Dada and Surrealist Film. She is currently at work on a book entitled Hidden Voices: Childhood, the Family and Anti-Semitism in Occupation France.

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Angus Gillespie is Professor of American Studies at Rutgers. In the late 1970s, he was among the first instructors in the American Studies Department at Rutgers to offer a course in film studies, “American Film and American Myth,” which focused on the great Hollywood classics of the 1930s and 1940s. More recently he has offered “Cult Film in America,” a survey of out-of-the mainstream films which characteristically feature atypical heroes and heroines, offbeat dialogue, and highly original story lines. Some of the films treated in this course, such as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, were underrated or neglected at the time of their release; others are mainstream films like Apocalypse Now that have attracted a devoted audience of repeat viewers whose attendance becomes a communal event.

Professor Gillespie's webpage

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Richard Koszarski is Associate Professor of English and Film at Rutgers. He received his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 1977; before coming to Rutgers he taught at Columbia University, NYU and the School of Visual Arts. From 1977-97 he was curator of the Museum of the Moving Image in New York. He is the recipient of research grants from the American Film Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1991 he was awarded the Prix Jean Mitry for his contributions to silent film scholarship; he has also served as an expert witness for the Walt Disney Company on questions of new media. Professor Koszarski's books include An Evening’s Entertainment: The Rise of The Silent Feature Picture (University of California Press, 1990), Von: The Life and Films of Erich von Stroheim (Limelight, 2001), Fort Lee, the Film Town (Indiana University Press, 2004) and Hollywood on the Hudson: Film and Television in New York from Griffith to Sarnoff (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

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Susan Martin-Márquez is Professor of Spanish and Cinema Studies at Rutgers. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Spanish-language cinema, World Cinema, and film theory. Her first book, Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford University Press, 1999) addresses questions of authorship and agency, female subjectivity, and national cinema, while providing reconsiderations and recontextualizations of feminist film theory. Her most recent book, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (Yale University Press, 2008), shows how Spanish colonialist films and other cultural texts construct Spanish identities with and against the nation's presumed "African heritage." Professor Martin-Márquez's forthcoming collaborative book is titled Cinema and the Mediation of Everyday Life: An Oral History of Cinema-Going in 1940s and 1950s Spain (Berghahn Books). Based on oral history interviews of filmgoers from four urban centers in Spain, this book studies how weekly movie attendance was imbricated with the management of material hardship and political repression during the Franco dictatorship. Her current book project is titled Radical Filmmakers at the Transatlantic Crossroads: New Cinemas and Networks of Exchange in the Long 1960s.

Professor Martin-Márquez's webpage

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Fatima Naqvi is Associate Professor and Graduate Director in the Department of Germanic, Russian and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers. Her first book, The Literary and Cultural Rhetoric of Victimhood: Western Europe 1970-2005 (Palgrave, 2007), analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968; her second book False Familiarity: Films of Michael Haneke (Falsche Vertrautheit: Filme von Michael Haneke) will appear in Fall of 2010 with Synema Verlag, Vienna. She has edited an issue of Modern Austrian Literature devoted to the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek and written articles on Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý, film adaptation as melancholic translation (Michael Haneke and Ingeborg Bachmann), history and cosmology in Christoph Ransmayr's prose and Anselm Kiefer's works, as well as dilettantism in Thomas Bernhard's novels, among other topics. Her current book project focuses on the role of visual culture (painting, photography, and film) in the work of Thomas Bernhard (under contract with Northwestern University Press). Currently, she teaches courses on post-war German film, Vienna 1900, and the Austrian and German literary tradition of the 20th century. She received her B.A. from Dartmouth College in 1993 and her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2000.


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Albert Nigrin is Cinema Studies Lecturer at Rutgers. Courses he teaches for the American Studies and English Departments include: "American Experimental Film," "Documentary Film," "David Lynch and the American Avant-Garde," "Cult Films in American Culture" and "Major Filmmakers." In addition, he is the Executive Director of the Rutgers Film Co-op/New Jersey Media Arts Center, Inc., which presents the New Jersey Film Festival, the New Jersey International Film Festival, and the United States Super 8mm Film + Digital Video Festival. Professor Nigrin has an M.F.A. in Visual Arts/Film and Video from Rutgers University and he is also an award-winning experimental media artist. He was a 2002 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Media Arts Fellowship winner, and he has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts/ American Film Institute Mid-Atlantic Media Arts Fellowship Program and the Ford Foundation for his film/video work. In addition, his films/videos were screened as part of the 2004 Enter The Screen: Experimental Film program in Changzhou, China, the 2005 Floating Images: Experimental Film program in Shanghai, China, the 2006 Toronto Images Film Festival, the 1998-2001 Big as Life: An American History of 8mm Filmmaking Retro at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and at many other Festivals, Media Centers and Universites. His films/videos are distributed by Canyon Cinema.

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Michael Rockland is Professor of American Studies at Rutgers and the author of thirteen books. His film experience includes writing the script for and acting in the PBS film Three Days on Big City Waters, in which he plays one of two adventurous Rutgers professors who decide to canoe to Manhattan island starting out in little streams in Central New Jersey and ending up in the ruins of Ellis Island, where the climactic scenes of the film take place. Professor Rockland was also the cultural commentator for three years on PBS's New Jersey Nightly News, producing a multitude of mini-documentaries for that show. He has also been peripherally involved in the making of two major Hollywood films: his son, Jeffrey, played the part of the little boy, Sasha, in Dr. Zhivago, and his home in Morristown was the principal set for the Meryl Streep-Renee Zellwegger-William Hurt movie One True Thing. Professor Rockland also teaches the course "The Nexus of Film and Literature" as a senior seminar principally for majors in American Studies but open as well to Cinema Studies students.

Professor Rockland's Faculty Profile

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Dianne Sadoff is Professor of English at Rutgers. She has published Monsters of Affection: Dickens, Bronte, and Eliot on Fatherhood (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982) and Sciences of the Flesh: Representing Body and Subject in Psychoanalysis (Stanford University Press, 1998) and has co-edited Teaching Contemporary Theory to Undergraduates (MLA, 1994) and Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Her most recently completed book, Victorian Vogue: British Novels On Screen (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), argues that the late twentieth-century and early millennial explosion of Victorian fictions on film functions to arouse and allay anxieties about the perceived crises of marital longevity and fidelity, family and generational relations, masculine capability and female pliability, the failures of conventional biological reproduction, and about the future of high culture and the changing nature of cultural work.

Professor Sadoff's webpage

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Meheli Sen is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and AMESALL (African, Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Literatures) at Rutgers. Her primary research area is post-independence commercial Hindi cinema, commonly referred to as Bollywood.  She is especially interested in questions of gender, genre, postcoloniality, and globalization. Sen’s work has been published in journals such as LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of the Moving Image, Many Cinemas and South Asian Review, as well as in the edited anthology Bollywood and Globalization: Indian Popular Cinema, Nation, and Diaspora (Anthem Press, 2010). She is co-editing an anthology titled Figurations in Indian Film, forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan. Her current research engages ‘B’ genres, particularly horror, in the larger rubric of the Bollywood system, especially the very specific conduits of distribution and reception therein. She is also working on a book-length manuscript on post-independence Hindi cinema titled Discontented Modernities: Gender, Genre and Nation in Post-Independence Hindi Cinema.

Sen’s teaching interests include Bollywood, Regional Cinemas of India, Asian Cinemas, Introduction to Film, Film Theory, Genre Studies, Global Horror, Film and Literature, and Postcolonial/Global Cinemas.

Rhiannon Noel Welch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Italian and the program in Cinema Studies. Her research and teaching interests include 19^th-21^st century Italian cultural studies, literature, and film. Her work focuses on Italian (post-)colonialism and biopolitics;race thinking and nationalism in Italy; Italian migration literature and film; labor and work in the Italian cultural imagination; and fascism and ideology. Her approach to cultural texts is informedby critical theory, film theory, and political philosophy.

She received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley (2008).

Her book manuscript, Vital Subjects: Race, (Re)productivity, and Italian Modernity,calls for a reading of the post-Unification project of “making” Italians as modern political subjectsthat takes into account the encounter between race, biopolitics, and colonialism in Italian literature, political narrative, and filmproduced between Unification (ca. 1861) and the end of the First World War.

Her second book project, entitled Economies of Loss: Colonial Drive in Modern Italian Visual Culture, reads Italian colonial visual culture (photography, popular cartography, architecture, and film) in relation to the pervasive rhetoric of loss in Italian colonial discourse.

She has recently begun work on an essay theorizing the relationship between biopolitics and film. Other recent projects include: an article on the rhetoric of hospitality in first-waveItalophone literature of the 1990’s; an article on the toposof mal d’Africa in the writings of Alfredo Oriani, F.T. Marinetti and Pier Paolo Pasolini; and an annotated translation of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1914 essay on early cinema. Her translation of political philosopher Roberto Esposito’s Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity,Biopolitics is forthcoming (Fordham University Press).

Alan Williams is Professor of French at Rutgers. He has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including "French Cinema of the Occupation," "Cinema Between the World Wars," "Writing Film History," "Film Theory," "Theories of Realism," and "French Stars and Genres." His research centers on film history, broadly defined, particularly on crisis points such as the transition from "silent" cinema to the talkies, the German Occupation, the years of the nouvelle vague and the time of the final negotiations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Professor Williams' work also links approaches to cinema that are normally considered distinct, such as theories of spectatorship, genre studies, economic history, and the study of the influence of social events and configurations on filmmaking. His books include Max Ophuls and the Cinema of Desire (Arno, 1980), Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Harvard University Press, 1992), and the edited volume Film and Nationalism (Rutgers University Press, "Depth of Field," 2002).

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