Vito Adriaensens is a PhD student and teaching assistant in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Antwerp and researcher and lecturer at the School of Arts, University College Ghent. He is working on a dissertation that investigates the influence of nineteenth-century theatrical and pictorial strategies on the visual rhetoric of feature-length productions by Gaumont and Nordisk between 1908 and 1914 and, by extension, on the pan-European style of the 1910s. At the School of Arts, he is working on a project that focuses on the cinematic representation of fine arts, from living statues in early cinema to murderous wax museum artists. His research focuses on the interaction between visual arts, theater, and film, with an emphasis on silent cinema. In 2013, he has been a visiting scholar at the University of Copenhagen.
Robert Arnett is associate professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He teaches film history, criticism courses, and screenwriting. He has published in Creative Screenwriting, Journal of Popular Film and Television, Film Criticism, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His screenplays have won national awards and representation by RPM International in Hollywood. Also, his screenwriting students have won national awards and have gone on to MFA programs and graduate screenwriting programs.
Jonah Corne is assistant professor in the Department of English, Film, and Theatre at the University of Manitoba. He received his PhD in 2008 from Cornell, where he wrote his dissertation on architecture in modernist literature. His essays and reviews have appeared in Film International, Literature/Film Quarterly, Screening the Past, Modernist Cultures, and the anthology Georg Simmel in Translation (2006).
David LaRocca is writer-in-residence at the New York Public Library and fellow at the Moving Picture Institute. He is the author of On Emerson (2003) and Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor (2013) as well as the editor of Stanley Cavell’s Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes (2003), The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (2011), and Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell (2013). He is the director of the documentary film Brunello Cucinelli: A New Philosophy of Clothes (2013) and is currently editing a new volume—The Philosophy of War Films—for the University Press of Kentucky Philosophy of Popular Culture series. He has also contributed essays to the press’s volumes on Spike Lee (2011), the Coen brothers (updated edition, 2012), and Tim Burton (2014) in this same series. His articles on aesthetic theory, American philosophy, autobiography, and film have appeared in such journals as Epoché, Afterimage, Transactions, Liminalities, Film and Philosophy, Midwest Quarterly, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Journal of Aesthetic Education.
R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University, where he also directs the Film Studies Program. He is the author, editor, or general editor of more than fifty books on various cinematic and literary subjects. Most recently, he has written To Kill a Mockingbird: The Relationship Between the Text and the Film (2009), Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (2009, with Robert Bray), and Shot on Location: Real Space in Postwar American Film (forthcoming). He has edited or coedited several works, including Larger Than Life: Movie Stars of the 1950s (2010), The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh (2012, with Steven Sanders), “A Little Solitaire”: John Frankenheimer and Postwar America (2012), Modern American Drama on Screen (2013), and Modern British Drama on Screen (2013).
Tom Paulus teaches film studies in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Antwerp. He is the former curator of film and digital media at the Museum for Contemporary Art and former editor of the media journal AS/Andere Sinema. He has published on issues of genre and film style in such journals as Film International and Foundations of Science. His essays on pictorial style in the films of John Ford have been published in three edited collections: John Ford in Focus (2007); Westerns: Movies from Hollywood and Paperback Westerns (2007); and New Perspectives on The Quiet Man (2009). He is also the editor, with Rob King, of Slapstick Symposium: Essays on Silent Comedy (2010).
Murray Pomerance is professor in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University. He is the author of An Eye for Hitchcock (2004), Savage Time (2005), Johnny Depp Starts Here (2005), The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience beyond Narrative and Theory (2008), Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema (2010), Edith Valmaine (2011), Tomorrow (2012), Alfred Hitchcock’s America (2013), and The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (2013), as well as editor or coeditor of more than a dozen volumes, including The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema (2013) and Cinema and Modernity (2006). He edits the Horizons of Cinema series at the State University of New York Press and the Techniques of the Moving Image series at Rutgers University Press and coedits the Star Decades and Screen Decades series at Rutgers with Adrienne L. McLean and Lester D. Friedman, respectively.
Ivo Ritzer is assistant professor in the Media and Film Department at Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He has widely published on film, media, and cultural theory. His work includes monographs and edited or coedited books on the dialectics of genre theory and auteurism (Walter Hill: Welt in Flammen, 2009), the gangster film (Mythos der Pate, 2011), representations of the body in the media (Global Bodies, 2012), transgression in TV series (Fernsehen wider die Tabus, 2012), French crime cinema (Polar, 2012), intercultural perspectives on the Western (Crossing Frontiers, 2012), and genre hybridization and cultural globalization (Global Cinematic Flows, 2013). Current research projects focus on performativity of film and TV, inter- and cross-mediality, and new approaches to mise-en-scène criticism.
David Rodríguez-Ruiz is a PhD candidate at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He received the Patrick Romanell Dissertation Award for his research on cognitive ontology and the methodology of epistemology. He has a BS in mathematics and an MA (ABD) in philosophy from the University of Puerto Rico. He has taught courses in mathematics and philosophy and worked as graduate assistant to the editor of the Transactions of the Charles Sanders Pierce Society and as research assistant to the director of the National Center for Ontological Research in Buffalo.
Steven Rybin is assistant professor of film at Georgia Gwinnett College. He is the author of Terrence Malick and the Thought of Film (2011) and Michael Mann: Crime Auteur (2013) as well as the coeditor of Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema (2014). He is currently writing a book about the performance of courtship in classical Hollywood cinema.
Steven Sanders is professor emeritus of philosophy at Bridgewater State University. He works primarily in the areas of philosophy, film, and television, ethics, and analytic existentialism. He is the author of the critical monograph Miami Vice (2010), editor of The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film (University Press of Kentucky, 2008), coeditor with Aeon J. Skoble of The Philosophy of TV Noir (University Press of Kentucky, 2008), and coeditor with R. Barton Palmer of The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh (University Press of Kentucky, 2011). His essay on Orson Welles has appeared in Film Noir: The Directors (2012), and he has contributed essays, articles, and entries to The Philosophy of Film Noir (University Press of Kentucky, 2006), Hitchcock and Philosophy (2007), 101 Sci-Fi Movies You Must See Before You Die (2009), The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese (University Press of Kentucky, 2009), Film Noir: the Encyclopedia (2010), A Companion to Film Noir (2013), Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema (2014).
Aeon J. Skoble is professor of philosophy and chairman of the Philosophy Department at Bridgewater State University and senior fellow at the Fraser Institute. He is the author of Deleting the State: An Argument about Government (2008), the editor of Reading Rasmussen and Den Uyl: Critical Essays on Norms of Liberty (2008), and the coeditor of Political Philosophy: Essential Selections (1999) and Reality, Reason, and Rights (2011). Besides his academic writing, he has frequently lectured and written for the Institute for Humane Studies and the Foundation for Economic Education. His main research includes theories of rights, the nature and justification of authority, and virtue ethics. In addition, he has written widely on the intersection of philosophy and popular culture, including such subjects as Seinfeld, Forrest Gump, The Lord of the Rings, superheroes, film noir, Westerns, Hitchcock, Scorsese, science fiction, and baseball, and in these areas of interest he is also coeditor of Woody Allen and Philosophy (2004), The Simpsons and Philosophy (2000), and, with Steven Sanders, The Philosophy of TV Noir (University Press of Kentucky, 2008).
Aga Skrodzka is assistant professor of film studies in the English Department at Clemson University. She is the author of Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe (2012). Her research focuses on the notion of European periphery and the alternative aesthetics used in cinema to communicate the sense of peripherality. Her next book-length project, focusing on kinetic bodies and paralyzed subjects, addresses the figure of the eastern European sex slave in recent films about human trafficking, with an emphasis on mobility and labor. Both in research and teaching, she engages with transnational theory, film theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory. She has published articles and book chapters on films by the masters of Polish cinema (Jan Jakub Kolski, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Walerian Borowczyk), but also by Hollywood auteurs, including John Woo and Martin Scorsese.
David Sterritt, chair of the National Society of Film Critics and chief book critic of Film Quarterly, is a film professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art and Columbia University, where he also cochairs the University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation. He is contributing editor at Tikkun, contributing writer at Cineaste and MovieMaker, and an editorial board member of Cinema Journal, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Beat Studies, and Hitchcock Annual. His writing has appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, the New York Times, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Journal of American History, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and many other publications. His twelve books include The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (1993), Spike Lee’s America (2013), and The Beats: A Very Short Introduction (2013).
Mark Wildermuth received his PhD in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is professor of English and Dunagan Research Fellow at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. His work has appeared in Philosophy and Rhetoric, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Journal of Popular Film and Television, The Age of Johnson, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. He has recently published two books: Blood in the Moonlight: Michael Mann and Information Age Cinema (2005) and Print, Chaos, and Complexity: Samuel Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Media Culture (2008).
Alan Woolfolk is vice president of academic affairs at Flagler College in Saint Augustine, Florida. He holds a PhD in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and previously taught at Oglethorpe University and Southern Methodist University. He has published extensively on contemporary culture, public intellectuals, and film. Woolfolk has twice been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and is a member of the editorial board of Society.