Joe M. Dealey, Sr. Professor in Media Studies, University Distinguished Teaching Professor
Charles Ramírez Berg is the author of Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (Austin: U. of Texas Press, 2002) as well as Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983 and Posters from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema (Mexico City: The Mexican Film Institute and the U. of Guadalajara Press), reprinted as Cine Mexicano: Posters from the Golden Age, 1936-1956 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2001).
His latest book, The Classical Mexican Cinema: The Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films (2015, University of Texas Press), was the Grand Prize winner of the 2016 University Co-Op Robert W. Hamilton Book Awards and was named an Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association.
In addition, he has written many articles and book chapters on Latinos in U.S. films, film history and narratology, Mexican cinema, as well as entries for the World Film Encyclopedia, The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. He has also consulted on several documentaries on Latinos in film, been interviewed for several others, and authored essays for three Criterion DVDs.
He has published fiction, poetry, and co-authored a children's book, The Gift of the Poinsettia, with Chicana poet Pat Mora (Houston: Arte Público Press/U. of Houston, 1995). From 1991-1994, he served on the Executive Council of the Society for Cinema Studies (now the Society for Cinema and Media Studies). One of the founders of the Austin Film Society, Ramírez Berg is a charter member of its Board of Directors, served as its president from 2001-2003, and continues to be an active member of the Board. Since 2010 he has served as the University of Texas Marshal.
He has served on the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress since 2010, and was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, 1997-1998. In August 2022, he was invited to vote in the British Film Institute and Sight and Sound’s Greatest Films of All Time Poll, 2022.
Ramírez Berg is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers (1996) and has won every major teaching award at The University of Texas. Among his teaching awards are the Friar Centennial Teaching Fellowship (1999-2000), the Piper Professor Award (2003), awarded by the Minnie Stevens Piper Foundation "for outstanding academic and scholarly achievement and for dedication to the teaching profession," and the Chancellor's Council Outstanding Teaching Award (2004). More recently, he was the recipient of the Board of Regents' Outstanding Teacher Award (2009), was named one of The University of Texas’ Top Ten Great Professors in the June 2011 issue of the UT alumni magazine, The Alcalde, and received the Distinguished University Lecturer Award from the School of Undergraduate Studies (2018).
At the undergraduate level, he regularly teaches courses in film history and criticism, including: RTF 321D, Film History from 1890 to 1960; RTF 322D, Film Hstory from 1960 to the present; a class on the depiction of Latinos in US film, RTF 365 Latino Images in Film; and a class on Mexican film history, RTF 345. At the graduate level, he teaches RTF 385K, Film History; RTF 386, Alternative Poetics; and a graduate class on teaching at the college level, RTF 398T, Pedagogy.
Charles was an extra in Spy Kids and Slacker, and his last name was a visual plot point in The Dark Knight.
