Kristen Whissel
PhD, Brown University, Associate Professor of Film & Media

Address

Film & Media
6212 Dwinelle Hall
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
E-mail: kwhissel@berkeley.edu

Bio

Kristen Whissel teaches courses on early cinema, film historiography, cinema and digital technologies, the theory and history of special effects, modernity and post-modernity, as well genre courses on film comedy, melodrama, and the woman’s film. She is the author of Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and Silent Cinema (Duke University Press 2008), which was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award in English Language Media Studies (Honorable Mention) in 2010.  She is currently completing a book titled Digital Effects Cinema.  In 2007 she was awarded the Divisional Distinguished Teaching Award in the Arts and Humanities. She currently serves on the editorial board of Film Criticism.

Select Bibliography

“The Digital Multitude” Cinema Journal vol. 49. no. 4 (Summer 2010).

Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology and the Silent Cinema (Duke University Press 2008).

“Tales of Upward Mobility: The ‘New Verticality’ and Digital Special Effects” Film Quarterly vol. 59, no. 4 (Summer 2006).

–Reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism (7th edition) Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, eds. (Oxford University Press, 2009).

“Mobilizing Melodrama: The Little American and the Struggle Over Wartime Identity” in America First: Naming the Nation in US Film (London: Routledge, April 2007).

“The Gender of Empire: American Modernity, Masculinity and Edison’s War Actualities” A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Durham: Duke UP, 2002).

“Placing the Spectator on the Scene of History: the Battle Reenactment at the Turn of the Century from ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’ to the Early Cinema.” Historical Journal for Radio, Film & Television Vol. 22.3 (2002).

“Regulating Mobility: Modernity, Traffic, and Feature-Length Narrativity in Traffic in Souls.” Camera Obscura Vol. 39 (Spring 2002).

Uncle Tom, Goldilocks, and the Rough Riders: Early Cinema’s Encounter with Empire.” Screen Vol. 40.4 (Winter 1999).