Bio

Kristen Whissel teaches courses on early cinema, film historiography, digital effects and contemporary cinema, modernity and post-modernity, and 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) and is currently working on a book titled Digital Effects Cinema.  In 2007 she was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award in the Arts and Humanities.

Select Bibliography

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).

“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).