People / Faculty

Permanent Faculty

Kristen Whissel

Chair of Film & Media, Professor of Film & Media

Specialty areas

Digital cinema, Early cinema, Film history, History and theory of visual effects, New technologies.

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Office:

6212 Dwinelle Hall

By appointment

Contact:

t: (510) 642-6485

Bio

Kristen Whissel’s research focuses on cinema and technological change, silent cinema and modernity, digital cinema, visual effects, and the history and theory of the stereoscope and 3D cinema. She teaches courses on early cinema, film historiography, cinema and digital technologies, cinema and media in transition, the theory and history of special/visual effects, modernity and post-modernity, as well genre courses on film comedy, melodrama, and the woman’s film. She is the author of Spectacular Digital Effects: CGI and Contemporary Cinema (Duke University Press 2014) and Picturing American Modernity: Traffic, Technology, and Silent Cinema (Duke University Press 2008). The latter was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award in English Language Media Studies (Honorable Mention) in 2010. In 2007 she was awarded the Divisional Distinguished Teaching Award in the Arts and Humanities at U.C. Berkeley. She currently serves on the editorial board of Film Criticism

Books

Whissel spectacular
Whissel picturing