Vita
Mary Ann Doane, is George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. During 1996-1997 and 1998-2000, she was also Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media. She has served on the Executive Board of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and has held visiting teaching positions at New York University and the University of Iowa. In 1994, she was Frederic Ives Carpenter Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. A specialist in film theory, feminist theory and semiotics, Doane holds degrees from Cornell University (B.A. English, 1974) and the University of Iowa (M.A. Speech and Dramatic Art, 1976; Ph.D. Speech and Dramatic Art, 1979).
Dated from 2011
Fields of research
Film theory; feminist film studies; cultural theory; media theory; psychoanalysis; semiotics; photography; television (the televisual representation of catastrophe); digital media.
IKKM Research Project
Cinematic Scale, Perspective and the Modern Sublime
The philosophical and aesthetic concept of the sublime has historically been associated with notions of boundlessness, awe, terror and infinity, linking subjectivity and affect to concepts of spatial dimension. The figuring of the cinema as »bigger than life« connected it to an aesthetics of magnitude as well as concepts of ineffability and unspeakability. This lecture links the structuring of space in the cinema, particularly the uses of perspective and the close-up, to the problematic of the modern subject’s relation to cognition, location, and totality.
Publications
Monographs
The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, The Archive.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2002.
Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge 1991.
The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1987.
Edited Books
Differences 18:1. Special Issue: "Indexicality: Trace and Sign." Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2007.
with Patricia Mellencamp and Linda Williams: Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism. Frederick, MD: University Publications of America and The American Film Institute, 1984.
Articles
"Screening the Avant-Garde Face". In: Elizabeth Weed and Judith Butler (eds.): Terms of Gender. Bloomington: Indiana UP forthcoming, 2010.
"Hat das Medium Gewicht?" in: zfm 2/2010, Schwerpunkt "Aufzeichnen",
"Closeness, Distance, and Scale in The Films Of Otto Preminger". In: Otto Preminger, Regista. Generi, stile, storie, ed. Giulia Anastasia Carluccio. Torino: Kaplan 2009, p.33-54.
"The General and the Derailing of Time". Italian translation in: Paolo Bertetto (ed.): I portatori del tempo. Storia delle arti contemporanee — Vol. I: Il Tempo Comico. Milan: Mondadori Electa 2009.
"Scale and the negotiation of "real" and "unreal" space in the cinema". In: Lucia Nagib and Cecilia Antakly de Mello (eds.): Realism and the Audiovisual Media. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2009, p. 63-84.
"The Location of the Image: Cinematic Projection and Scale in Modernity": In: Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (eds.): The Art of Projection. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz 2009.
"Scale and the negotiation of 'real' and 'unreal' space in the cinema". In: Lucia Nagib and Cecilia Antakly de Mello (eds.): Realism and the Audiovisual Media. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan 2009.
"The Close-up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema". In: Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (Fall 2003).
"The Location of the Image: Cinematic Projection and Scale in Modernity". In: Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (eds.): The Art of Projection. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2009.