Sharon Willis

Sharon Willis

Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Fine Arts

Professor of Art and Art History

Professor of Visual and Cultural Studies

PhD, French Literature, Cornell University, 1984

Office Location
517 Morey Hall
Telephone
(585) 275-5757

Office Hours: Mondays, 12:45 to 1:45 p.m. and by appointment

Curriculum Vitae

Research Overview

Research Interests

  • Film history and theory
  • visual and cultural studies
  • women's studies and feminist theory
  • comparative literature and critical theory
  • French cinema
  • 19th and 20th century French literature

Graduate Courses Taught

  • AHST 411:  French Cinema: The New Wave
  • AHST 413:  Race and Gender in Popular Film
  • AHST 454:  Film History: 1959-1989
  • AHST 483:  Contemporary French Film
  • AHST 554:  The Films of Jean-Luc Godard
  • AHST 561:  Classical Film Theory

Undergraduate Courses Taught

  • AHST 100:  Intro to Visual and Cultural Studies
  • AHST 211:  French Cinema: The New Wave
  • AHST 213:  Race and Gender in Popular Film
  • AHST 253:  Film History: 1929-1959
  • AHST 254:  Film History: 1959-1989
  • AHST 283:  Contemporary French Film
  • AHST 354:  The Films of Jean-Luc Godard
  • AHST 361:  Classical Film Theory

Selected Publications

Books

  • High Contrast: Race and Gender in Popular Film (Duke University Press, 1997)
  • Co-Editor, with Constance Penley, Male Trouble (University of Minnesota Press, 1993)
  • Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (University of Illinois Press, 1987)
  •  “The Poitier Effect: Melodramas of Racial Pedagogy,” manuscript under consideration (University of Minnesota Press)

Articles and Book Chapters

  • “Blasting Boundaries: Genre, Gender, and Sadism in Django Unchained,” solicited for Quentin Tarantino’sDjango Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema, ed. Oliver Speck (Continuum, 2014)
  • “Moving Pictures: Spectacles of Enslavement,” solicited for The Cambridge Companion to Slavery and American Literature,” ed., Ezra Tawil (Cambridge University Press, 2014)
  •  “Keeping It Real: Media Memory in Talk to Me (Kasi Lemmons, 2007), under consideration
  • “Afterword,” Marguerite Duras, L’Amour, trans., Kazim Ali and Libby Murphy (Open Letter Press) forthcoming, July 2013
  • “‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater: Liquidating History in Inglourious Basterds,” in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds: Manipulations of Metacinema, ed., Robert von Dassanowsky (Continuum Press, 2012) 163-192
  • “2002: Movies and Melancholy” in American Cinema of the 2000s, ed., Timothy Corrigan, in the Screen Decades series (Rutgers University Press, 2012) 61-82
  •  “Lost Objects: The Museum of Cinema,” for The Renewal of Cultural Studies, ed., Paul Smith, (Temple University Press, 2011) 93-102
  •  “Jean-Luc Godard and Breathless,” segment of  “The French New Wave at Fifty,” program #276 of What’s the Word?, the Modern Language Association weekly radio series (2009)
  •  “A Cinema of Migrations: Ziad Doueiri’s West Beyrouth,” Shifting Landscapes: Film and Media in European Context, ed. Miyase Christensen and Nezih Erdogan (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2008) 132-152, reprinted 2009
  •  “1991: Movies and Wayward Images,“ in American Cinema of the 1990s, ed., Chris Holmlund, for Screen Decades series (Rutgers University Press, 2008) 45-69
  •  “(Re) Inventing Camera Obscura,” with Amelie Hastie, Lynne Joyrich, and Patricia White, in Inventing Film Studies: Essays Toward the History of a Discipline, ed., Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Duke University Press, 2008) 298-319, reprinted from “Camera Obscura At Thirty,” Camera Obscura 61 (2006) 1-25
  • Edited, with Constance Penley, “Sword and Sorcery, S/M, and the  Economics of Inadequation: The Camera Obscura Interview,” (Interview with Samuel R. Delany)  in Samuel R. Delany, Silent Interviews (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1994) 127-163, reprinted from Samuel R. Delany, “The Column at the Market's Edge,” The Motion of Light in Water (London: Paladin, 1991) 535-78

Affiliations

  • Co-Editor, Camera Obscura, 1991-
  • Executive Committee, MLA Division for Literature and the Other Arts: 1996-99; MLA Division on Film, 2002-2005
  • Society for Cinema and Media Studies
  • American Studies Association
  • Film and Media Studies Program: Director, 1997-2001;  2002-2004; 2007-2013
  • Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender and Women’s Studies: Director, 1991-93; Steering Committee, 1987-88; 1990-91; Chair, Curriculum Committee, 1987-88; Curriculum Committee member, 1989-90; 2002-. Curriculum Director, 2006-2007
  • David O. Selznick Master’s Program in Preservation Studies, Academic Faculty, 2004-
  • Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African-American Studies, Executive Committee, 2002-
  • Mellon Humanities Corridor Committee, 2008-2010

Current Projects

  • Book project: “Lost and Found: World War II and Cinematic Memory.”
  • “Precious Realism: The Help (2010), Precious (2009), and Monster’s Ball (2001).