Linda Williams

Visual & Critical Studies Forum
Wednesday, December 2, 10 am – 12 pm
Boardroom, San Francisco campus

Linda Williams teaches courses in University of California, Berkeley’s Film Studies department on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and “body genres” of all sorts) and is currently working on a study of sex in cinema and new media since the sixties. She has also recently taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Luis Bunuel, eastern and western forms of melodrama, film theory, and selected “sex genres.” Her books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema, Figures of Desire (1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), an edited volume on film spectatorship, Viewing Positions (1993) and Reinventing Film Studies (co-edited with Christine Gledhill, 2000). Williams’s latest book is Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of
Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001, Princeton).