Biography Richard M. Gollin

The founder and for twenty years director of the University of Rochester's Film Studies Program and of its film resource center, Richard Gollin has taught many different kinds of film courses, lectured on film to civic and professional groups in the United States, Canada, Britain, and Japan, and written on film for such publications as the "Quarterly Review of Film Studies," "College English," and "Christianity and Literature." He received his Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota, studied at Oxford University and later briefly at the American Film Institute School for Advanced Study, and taught at the University of Minnesota and Colgate University before coming to the University of Rochester, where he is now Professor Emeritus of English and Film Studies.

Earlier he taught and published in Romantic, Victorian, and modern literature and drama as well as film, and he has also directed doctoral research in those fields. His literary research examined the relationship of intellectual history to literary form, especially the ways mid-Victorian crises of religious faith and conscience variously affected that century's poets.

He has served as a consultant to other institutions seeking to institute their own film studies programs, has twice served as a program director of the Rochester International Film Festival, has twice been a juror in annual CINE competitions, and once, memorably, served as an expert witness in a film obscenity case. He has received Fulbright, Ford, Wilson, ACLS, and Rockefeller scholarships and fellowships, and a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop film studies at the University of Rochester in conjunction with the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House.

His most recent book is A Viewer's Guide to Film: Arts, Artifices, and Issues (McGraw-Hill, 1992), and his next -- in progress -- is tentatively titled The Moral Vision of Screen Comedy.