Barbara Klinger

Barbara Klinger is Provost Professor Emerita in Cinema and Media Studies in The Media School at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. She received her M.A. in Film Studies from Ohio University and her Ph.D. in Film/Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. A film historian and theorist, her research focuses on US cinema, from analyzing film industry practices and uses of media technologies to understanding the cultural and historical dimensions of movies. She also works in the area of reception studies, exploring the factors that influence the meaning of films in specific social and historical contexts. At Indiana University, she served as the Director of Film Studies, the Director of Cultural Studies, and as Interim Chair for her department. In the field more broadly, she was elected President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and served on the SCMS Executive Board. Her work has twice won the SCMS’s Katherine Singer Kovács Essay Award, for “Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies” (Screen, 1997) and “Contraband Cinema: Piracy, Titanic, and Central Asia” (Cinema Journal, 2011). Besides Immortal Films, her books include Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (1994) and Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (2006). Her articles have also appeared in Film Quarterly, Convergence, the New Review of Film and Television Studies, and other publications.