Assistant Professor of German, Affiliated Faculty in Film & Media
Nicholas Baer received his B.A. in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in Film & Media and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago, and he held faculty appointments at the State University of New York at Purchase, University of Groningen, and Utrecht University before joining Berkeley's Department of German in 2023. At Berkeley, Baer is also affiliated with the Department of Film & Media, Program in Critical Theory, Center for Jewish Studies,...
Professor in English, Affiliated Faculty in Film & Media; Faculty member of the Critical Theory designated emphasis
Stephen Best’s scholarship encompasses a variety of fields and materials: American and African-American literature and culture, cinema and technology, rhetoric and the law, and critical theory. His research pursuits in the fields of American and African American criticism have been rather closely aligned with a broader interrogation of recent literary critical practice. To be specific, his interest in the critical nexus between slavery and historiography, in the varying scholarly and political preoccupations with establishing the authority of the slave past in black life, quadrates with an...
Professor in German, Affiliated Faculty in Film & Media
Professor Göktürk earned her Dr.phil. at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture. She also worked as a certified translator of Turkish for law courts, hospitals and publishers for several years. Her first full-time teaching appointment was at the University of Southampton, UK, in the School of Modern Languages and the Film Program from 1995 to 2001. She joined the Department of German at Berkeley in fall 2001. She has served as graduate adviser and, since 2013, department...
Professor & Ida Mae and William J. Eggers Chair in English
Jeffrey Knapp is the Eggers Professor of English at Berkeley and a Faculty Affiliate of Film & Media. After undergraduate and then graduate study at Berkeley, Knapp taught at Harvard for three years before returning to Berkeley in 1990. He has received the campus’s Distinguished Teaching Award and its Faculty Service Award; he is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an NEH Fellowship.
Knapp has written four books: An Empire Nowhere: England and America from Utopia to The Tempest (1992); Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and...
Professor in the Department of Scandinavian, Affiliated Faculty in Film & Media
Professor Rugg’s research has long focused on issues related to self-construction and self-representation, particularly in textual autobiography and visual media. Authorship is another strong allied research interest, with special attention to the authorships and authorial personae of August Strindberg, Mark Twain, Ingmar Bergman, and a range of art cinema directors who perform as authors. In addition to her interest in autobiographical studies, Rugg has drawn inspiration for her research from two of the courses she teaches: “Ecology and Culture in Scandinavia” and “Hyperwhite:...
Associate Professor of Italian Studies, Affiliated Faculty in Film & Media
Rhiannon Noel Welch works on modern Italian and postcolonial literature, film, and critical theory. Her research and teaching in Italian Studies and Film & Media seek to locate and complicate the bounds of ‘Italian’ literature and cinema, focusing on formal and ideological relations to broader cultural spaces and phenomena, such as urban modernity; fascism and postwar ‘redemption’; race and the biopolitics of ‘capture’; colonialism and its ongoing legacies; migration and diaspora; oceans, ecology and climate change, etc.
Her film-related publications include essays and chapters...
