COURSES
CA 354 - Styles and Genres
CA 463 - Avant-Garde Film
            Syllabus: PDF
CA 664 - Classical Film Theory

ACTIVITIES
My research has focused on social and historical issues in American silent cinema, the aesthetics of avant-garde film, and the history of film theory, particularly theory in the first third of the 20th century.  My first book examined the genre of sensational melodrama in early American cinema, tracing its transposition from popular theater and documenting its social and discursive contexts with respect to experiential and ideological transformations associated with modernity.  A second work collects and analyzes the writings of Alexander Bakshy, a pioneering theorist of spectatorship who argued for a modernist conception of overt presentationalism.  I am currently doing research on late Romantic currents, both stylistic and thematic, in early film criticism and avant-garde film.

DEGREES

• Ph.D. in Cinema Studies, New York University - 1996.
• B.A. Harvard University - 1985.
  

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. Columbia University Press. (2001).

Alexander Bakshy - Modernism and the Space of Spectatorship . A collection of Bakshy's essays gathered, edited, and introduced by Ben Singer. (Submitted).

"Feature Films, Variety Programs, and the Crisis of the Small Exhibitor," in Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp, eds., Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices University of California Press (2004).

"Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors," Cinema Journal 34:3 (Spring 1995): 5-35.

"Jeanne Dielman..., Cinematic Interrogation and 'Amplification,'" Millennium Film Journal 22 (Spring 1990): 56-75.

"Film, Photography, and Fetish: The Analyses of Christian Metz," Cinema Journal 27:4 (Summer 1988): 4-22. [Winner, Society of Cinema Studies Student Writing Award].

"Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope," Film History 2:1 (Winter 1988): 37-70.

"Connoisseurs of Chaos: Whitman, Vertov and the 'Poetic Survey,'" Literature/Film Quarterly 15:4 (Fall 1987): 247-258.