William P. Hobby Centennial Professor Emeritus of Communication and Professor Emeritus of Women's and Gender Studies
As a theoretician and historian of American film and television, Janet Staiger researches and has published on the following topics:
- authorship theory,
- various modes of production including classical Hollywood, "Indie" cinema, and world cinema,
- cultural and political issues of representation, especially involving gender, sexuality, and race/ethnicity,
- genre theory,
- the historical reception of cinema and television, and
- historiographical issues in writing media histories
Janet has served on various national committees including the National Film Preservation Board of the U.S. Library of Congress (1992-96) and the jury for the American Film Institute's Television Awards (2010, 2012). She is past president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (1991-93) and has served on the Executive Committees of the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.) (2005-09) and the Reception Studies Society (2005-present). At The University of Texas at Austin, she was Director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (2001-04) and Chair of the University’s Faculty Council (2009-10).
Author and editor of twelve books and over 80 essays, her book publications include:
- Political Emotions co-ed. with Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (Routledge, 2010)
- Convergence Media History co-ed. with Sabine Hake (Routledge, 2008)
- Media Reception Studies (New York University, 2005)
- Authorship and Film co-ed. with David Gerstner (Routledge, 2003)
- Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (New York University Press, 2000)
- Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era (New York University Press, 2000)
- Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema (University of Minnesota Press, 1995)
- The Studio System (ed.) (Rutgers University Press, 1995)
- Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton University Press, 1992)
- The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, co-author with David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson (Routledge & Kegan Paul/Columbia University Press, 1985)
Communication Arts, PhD, 1981 University of Wisconsin, Madison
English, MA, 1969 Purdue University
English and Speech, BA, 1968 University of Nebraska at Omaha
- Authorship Theory
- Modes of Production: Classical Hollywood, "Indie" Cinema, and more
- Cultural and Political Issues of Representation
- Genre Theory
- Historical Reception Studies of Film and Television
- Historiographical Issues in Writing Media Histories
Authorship Theory
Authorship and Film. Co-edited: David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger. New York: Routledge, 2002. Includes: “Authorship Approaches," pp. 27-57.
"Creating the Brand: The Hitchcock Touch," in The Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Jonathan Freedman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 40-56.
"'Because I am a Woman': Thinking 'Identity' and 'Agency' for Historiography," Film History 25, nos. 1-2 (2013) 205-14.
“Analysing Self-Fashioning in Authoring and Reception,” in Ingmar Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema and the Arts, ed. Maaret Koskinen. London: Wallflower, 2008. Pp. 89-106.
“Authorship Studies and Gus Van Sant,” Film Criticism 29, no. 1 (Fall 2004), 1-22.
Modes of Production: Classical Hollywood, "Indie" Cinema, and More
The Studio System. Edited. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. Co-authored: David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul and Columbia University Press, 1985.
"Scripting Protocols and Practices: Screenwriting in the Package-Unit Era," in Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited Classical, ed. Philippa Gates and Katherine Spring. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2021. Pp. 254-64.
"Proto-Indie: 1960s 'Half-Way' Cinema," in A Companion to American Indie Cinema, ed. Geoff King. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017. Pp. 205-32.
“Considering the Script as Blueprint in 2012,” Northern Lights [Denmark], 10 (2012), 75-90.
“Independent of What? Sorting out Differences from Hollywood,” in American Independent Cinema, ed. Geoff King, Claire Molloy, and Yannis Tzioumakis. London: Routledge, 2012. Pp. 15-27.
"Das Starsystem und der Klassische Hollywoodfilm" ["The Star System and the Classical Hollywood Cinema"] in Der Star: Geschichte, Rezeption, Bedeutung, ed. Werner Faulstich and Helmut Korte. Munchen, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1997. Pp.48-59.
"Le commerce international du cinema et les flux culturels mondiaux: une approche neomarxiste" ["World Film Trade and Global Cultural Flows: A Neo-Marxist Approach"] in Une Histoire economique du cinema francais (1895-1995): Regards croises franco-americans, ed. Pierre-Jean Behghozi and Christian Delage. Paris: Editions L'Harmattan, 1997. Pp. 341-62. Rpt. in Film and Nationalism, ed. Alan Williams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Pp. 230-48.
"I B Movies e il discorso de Hollywood sul pubblico." In Studi Americani: Modi di produzione a Hollywood dalle origini all'era televisiva, ed. Vito Zagarri. Venezia, Italy: Marsilio Editori, 1994. Pp. 263-269. Trans. Daniele Di Chiappari.
"Announcing Wares, Winning Patrons, Voicing Ideals: Thinking about the History and Theory of Film Advertising," Cinema Journal, 29, no. 3 (Spring 1990), 3-31.
"Standardization and Independence: The Founding Objectives of the SMPTE," SMPTE Journal, 96, no. 6 (June 1987), 532-537.
"'The Eyes are Really the Focus': Photoplay Acting and Film Form and Style," Wide Angle, 6, no. 4 (1985), 14-23.
"Blueprints for Feature Films: Hollywood's Continuity Scripts," in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio. 2nd ed. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Pp. 173-92.
"'Tame' Authors and the Corporate Laboratory: Stories, Writers, and Scenarios in Hollywood," The Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 8, no. 4 (Fall 1983), 33-45.
"Combination and Litigation: Structures of US Film Distribution, 1896-1917," Cinema Journal, 23, no. 1 (Winter 1983), 41-72.
"Individualism versus Collectivism: The Shift to Independent Production in the US Film Industry," Screen, 24, no. 4-5 (July-October 1983), 68-79.
"Seeing Stars," The Velvet Light Trap, no. 20 (1983), 10-14.
"Mass-Produced Photoplays: Economic and Signifying Practices in the First Years of Hollywood," Wide Angle, 4, no. 2 (1981), 12-27.
"Dividing Labor for Production Control: Thomas Ince and the Rise of the Studio System," Cinema Journal, 18, no. 2 (Spring 1979), 16-25.
Cultural and Political Issues of Representation
Political Emotions. Co-edited: Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds. New York: Routledge, 2010.
Bad Women: Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema, 1907-1915. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.
"Film Reception Studies and Feminism," in The Routledge Companion to Cinema & Gender, ed. Kristin Lené Hole, Dijana Jelača, E. Ann Kaplan, and Patrice Petro. New York, NY: Routledge, 2017. Pp. 332-41.
"The Slasher, The Final Girl, and the Anti-Denoument," in Style and Form in the Hollywood Slasher Film, ed. Wickham Clayton. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 213-28.
"'Based on the True Story of': Political Filmmaking and Analogical Thinking," RS*SI Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 30, nos. 1-3 (2010), 59-69.
"The Significance of Steven Spielberg's Old Mr. Lincoln: Political Emotions and Intertextual Knowledge," Jump Cut 55 (Fall 2013), http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/staigerLincoln/index.html.
“The Cutting Edge: Emergencies in Visual Culture,” Jump Cut (February 2006), www.ejumpcut. org/currentissue/SchaivoStaiger/index.html.
“Fault Line Stories: Families, Masculinities and Texas Dynasties,” The Texas Gulf Historical & Biographical Record, 37, no. 2 (November 2001), 45-58.
"Cinematic Shots: The Narration of Violence." In The Persistence of History, ed. Vivian Sobchack. New York: Routledge/American Film Institute Readers, 1996. Pp. 39-54. Rpt. in Perverse Spectators.
"Response to 'Ideology Takes a Day Off: Althusser and Mass Culture'," Studies in 20th Century Literature, 18, no. 1 (Winter 1994), 55-59. Rpt. as "The Places of Empirical Subjects in the Event of Mass Culture: Jeanie Bueller and Ideology" in Perverse Spectators.
"Self-Regulation and the Classical Hollywood Cinema," Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 6, no. 2 (Fall 1991), 221-231.
"Class, Ethnicity, and Gender: Explaining the Development of Early American Film Narrative," Iris [France], no. 11 (Summer 1990), 13-25.
"Securing the Fictional Narrative as a Tale of the Historical Real: The Return of Martin Guerre," South Atlantic Quarterly, 88, no. 2 (Spring 1989), 393-413. Rpt. in Perverse Spectators.
"Future Noir: Contemporary Representations of Visionary Cities," East-West Film Journal, 3, no. 1 (December 1988), 20-44.
Genre Theory
"Sound and the Comic/Horror Romance Film: Formula, Affect, and Inflection," in Voicing the Cinema: Film Music, and the Integrated Soundtrack," ed. James Buhler and Hannah Lewis. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. Pp. 245-59.
“Les Belles Dames sans Merci, Femmes Fatales, Vampires, Vamps, and Gold Diggers: The Transformation and Narrative Value of Aggressive Fallen Women,” in Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History, ed. Vicki Callahan. Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2010. Pp. 32-57.
“Film Noir as Male Melodrama: The Politics of Film Genre Labeling,” in The Shifting Definitions of Genre: Essays on Labeling Films, Television Shows and Media, ed. Lincoln Geraghty and Mark Jancovich. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008. Pp. 71-91.
Historical Reception Studies of Film and Television
Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005.
Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception. New York: New York University Press, 2000. 241pp. Includes reprints of:
- "Modes of Reception," in Le Cinema en Histoire: Institution cinematographique, reception filmique et reconstitution historique, ed. Andre‚ Gaudreault, Germain Lacasse and Isabelle Raynauld. Quebec, Canada: Editions nota bene, 1999. Pp. 305-323.
- “Writing the History of American Film Reception,” in Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby. London: British Film Institute, 2001. Pp. 19-32.
- "The Perversity of Spectators: Expanding the History of Classical Hollywood Cinema," in Moving Images, Culture and the Mind, ed. Ib Bondebjerg. Luton, England: University of Luton Press, 2000. Pp. 19-28.
- “The Cultural Productions of A Clockwork Orange,” in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, ed. Stuart Y. McDougal. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 37-60.
- "Finding Community in the Early 1960s: Underground Cinema and Sexual Politics," in Swinging Single: Representing Sexuality in the 1960s, ed. Hilary Radner and Moya Luckett. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. 38-74.
- "The Romances of the Blonde Venus: Movie Censors Versus Movie Fans," Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 6, no. 2 (Fall 1997), 5-20.
- "Hitchcock in Texas: Intertextuality in the Face of Blood and Gore," in "As Time Goes By": Festskrift i anledning Bjorn Sorenssens 50-arsday, ed. Gunnar Iversen, Stig Kulset, and Kathrine Skretting. Trondheim, Norway: Tapir, 1996. Pp. 189-197.
- "Taboos and Totems: Cultural Meanings of Silence of the Lambs." In Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. Jim Collins, Hilary Radner, and Ava Collins. NY: Routledge/American Film Institute, 1993. Pp. 142-54.
Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era. New York: New York University Press, 2000.
Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.
"Interpretive Pleasures in Experiencing Serial Fiction," Theoreme [Paris], forthcoming.
"Speculating about Spectatorship" [symposium on Hollywood Aesthetic], Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 14, no. 2 (Summer 2020), 75-80.
"The Audience of Perry Mason, or the Case of What People Write to Famous Authors," Participations 16, no. 2 (November 2019), 511-24, https://www.participations.org/Volume%2016/Issue%202/25.pdf.
"Mailer and Maidstone: When Cinéma Vérité Fiction Becomes Real," Participations 15, no. 1 (May 2018), http://www.participations.org/Volume%2015/Issue%201/3.pdf.
"Creating the Brand: The Hitchcock Touch," in The Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock, ed. Jonathan Freedman. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 40-56.
"'Nuking the Fridge': Great Expectations and Affective Reception," in Film Experience and Spectatorship: Between Cinema, Museum and Social Networks, ed. Wilfried Pauleit, Christine Rüffert, Karl-Heinz Schmid/Alfred Tews, and Stefano Odorico. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer Verlag, 2014. Pp. 135-50 (e-book version)..
“’The First Bond Who Bleeds, Literally and Metaphorically’: Gendered Spectatorship for ‘Pretty Boy’ Action Movies,” in Feminism at the Movies, ed. Hilary Radner and Rebecca Springer. New York: Routledge, 2011. Pp. 13-24.
"'Based on the True Story of': Political Filmmaking and Analogical Thinking," RS*SI Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 30, nos. 1-3 (2010), 59-69.
“The Centrality of Affect in Reception Studies,” [on Sweeney Todd] in Film-Kino-Zuschauer: Filmrezeption/Film-Cinema-Spectator: Film Reception, ed. Irmbert Schenk, Margrit Tröhler, and Yvonne Zimmermann. Marburg, Germany: Schüren, 2010. Pp. 85-98.
“Kiss Me Deadly: Cold War Threats from Spillane to Aldrich, New York to Los Angeles, and the Mafia to the H-Bomb,” in New Directions in American Reception Studies, ed. Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor. NY: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. 279-88.
“The Revenge of the Film Education Movement: Cult Movies and Fan Interpretative Behaviors,” Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History 1 (Fall 2008), 43-69. http://receptionstudy.org/files/Staiger.pdf .
“Cabinets of Transgression: Collecting and Arranging Hollywood Images,” Particip@tions 1, no. 3 (2005) http://www.participations.org/volume%201/issue%203/1_03_staiger_article…
"Film, Reception, and Cultural Studies," The Centennial Review, 36, no. 1(Winter 1992), 89-104.
"Reception Studies: The Death of the Reader," in The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed. R. Barton Palmer. Georgia State Literary Studies, no. 3. New York: AMS Press, 1989. Pp. 353-68.
"'The Handmaiden of Villainy': Methods and Problems in Studying the Historical Reception of a Film," Wide Angle, 8, no. 1 (1986), 19-27. Revision reprinted in Interpreting Films.
Historiographical Issues in Writing Media Histories
Convergence Media History. Co-edited: Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake. New York: Routledge, 2008.
"The Wertham Case: Evaluating Effects of Media Theories," in Moral Panics, Social Fears, and the Media: Historical Perspectives, ed. Sian Nicholas and Tom O'Malley. New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 46-55.
“Film History, Film Practices,” Scandia [Sweden] 76, no. 2 (2010), 13-30.
“The Future of the Past,” Cinema Journal 44, no. 1 (Fall 2004), 126-29.
“Matters of Taste, Subtexts of Rank,” Framework 45, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 76-80.
"Hybrid or Inbred: The Purity Hypothesis and Hollywood Genre History," Film Criticism, 22, no. 1 (Fall 1997), 5-20.
"The Pleasures and Profits of a Postmodern Film Historiography," Norsk medietidsskrift [Olso,Norway], 2, no. 2 (1995), 7-17.
"This Moving Image I Have Before Me," in Image as Artifact: The Historical Analysis of Film and Television, ed. John O'Connor. American Historical Association Institutional Services Program. Malabar, Florida: Robert Kreiger Publishers, 1990. Pp. 247-75.
"The Politics of Film Canons," Cinema Journal, 24, no. 3 (Spring 1985), 4-23. Dialogue response in 25, no. 1 (Fall 1985), 61-64.
"Theorist, yes, but what of? Bazin and History," Iris [France], 2, no. 2 (1984), 99-109.
"The History of World Cinema: Models for Economic Analysis," co-authored: Janet Staiger and Douglas Gomery, Film Reader, 4 (1979), 35-44.