VES Hires Second Film Studies Professor

David N. Rodowick, the noted cinema scholar who founded film studies programs at Yale and King’s College, London, will join the faculty of Harvard’s Department of Visual and Environmental Studies (VES) this fall.

Rodowick’s appointment as VES’s second full professor in film studies, after a three-year search, comes at a critical time, as the department readies itself to debut an undergraduate concentration track in film studies this fall with an eye toward an eventual graduate program in the field.

Germanic Languages and Literatures Department Chair Eric Rentschler, who has played a leading role in the development of Harvard’s film studies offerings, heaped praise on the man he calls “the leading intellectual historian of film studies.”

“We were looking for a scholar with a major international profile,” he said. “We wanted someone who was a player.”Rodowick, who served as a visiting professor in the fall 2003 term, will teach three courses in VES next year.

Among them will be the first of three large courses required of all film studies concentrators—VES 170a, currently titled “Introduction to Visual Studies & Film Analysis,” to be offered this fall. Rodowick is also slated to teach two smaller courses in the spring: VES 191, “From Cinematic to Digital Culture,” which he taught when he visited in the fall, and VES 192r, “Philosophy and Film.”

Dominique Blüher, Rodowick’s wife and a professor of film at the University of Rennes in France, will also join VES to teach one course a semester next year.

Rodowick’s hiring marks a milestone in the sometimes-rocky history of film studies at Harvard.

Harvard made two joint hires of junior faculty in film studies this fall, appointing Assistant Professor J.D. Connor ’92, also a Crimson editor, to VES and the English and American language and literature department, and Assistant Professor Despina Kakoudaki, who is on leave until the coming fall, to VES and the literature department.

Rentschler stressed the “key role” he expects Rodowick to play in setting up Harvard’s expected graduate program in film studies in the coming semesters—and lauded the University of Texas at Austin-trained scholar’s experience with fledgling film studies programs at prestigious universities.

Rodowick, who said he designed and administered Yale’s undergraduate film studies program from its start in the 1980s, currently heads the film studies department he said he created “literally from scratch” at King’s College, London. In between, he said he worked “to modernize and help remake the curriculum” of film studies at the University of Rochester.

“I often joke that I’m the Johnny Appleseed of film studies programs,” Rodowick said with a laugh when reached at his home in Rennes, France. “It’s wonderful to get in on the ground floor, because one can really have some influence.”

Though the undergraduate concentration track in film studies in VES was approved only this spring, its course offerings for next year are being finalized, Rentschler said.

Rodowick said the “pretty much set” undergraduate curriculum will leave him time to teach and help develop the contemplated graduate program.

“Usually I’m the one who has to come in and provide the leadership for creating everything,” he said. “[At Harvard,] I’m actually able to waltz right in with a pretty sound structure in place, which is kind of a relief actually.”

Rodowick said he looked forward to joining a community where the study of film is taken seriously.

“It doesn’t work without the strong support of the administration and also the support of faculty, and...considering what others have been able to do at Harvard in the last five or six years I think those things are there,” he said. “The students are always willing, that’s never the problem.”

Rodowick said he felt this has not always been the case at the College.

“Quite frankly, I think it’s a fairly new development,” he said. “I think Harvard probably watched what we’ve been doing at Yale for quite some time.”

Colleagues said Rodowick was likely to strengthen Harvard’s growing film studies program with his breadth of experience and interdisciplinary skill.

“It’s a great hire because Rodowick both has a specialty but also has the ability to teach a wide array of courses from that,” Connor said.

“You could grow the faculty by leaps and bounds around Rodowick” without making him obsolete or marginalizing him, Connor added.

Rodowick said that one of the biggest questions remaining to be answered as Harvard plans a graduate curriculum in film studies is how to balance the practice of filmmaking with its theory and criticism—a balance traditionally struck, if shakily, by the dual-natured VES department. In this, too, Rodowick—who Rentschler said earned “a sort of underground reputation among film studies people” with the experimental films he made as a student in Austin—has a broad range of experience.

“I originally came from an arts background, and I thought before I came to Yale I’d always have a dual career as an experimental filmmaker as well as a theoretician, as it were,” Rodowick said. “I enjoy working in a milieu with such a high degree of creativity here.”

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.