Professor Elizabeth Ezra

Professor of Cinema and Culture

French Stirling

Professor Elizabeth Ezra

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About me

I am currently the Programme Director for French, and for a number of years was the director of the combined undergraduate degrees in Global Cinema and Literature & Cinema. I did my PhD at Cornell University, and my undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I taught at Cornell, Hamilton College, and the State University of New York before coming to the UK in 1995. After writing my first book on early twentieth-century French colonial culture (The Colonial Unconscious), I moved into film studies, writing books on the work of film pioneer Georges Méliès and contemporary French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet, as well as editing books on European cinema, French cinema, and transnational cinema. I have also written on early Hollywood cinema, film and material culture, exoticism, and posthumanism. My latest books are Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film (co-edited with Catherine Wheatley, Edinburgh University Press 2020), and The Cinema of Things: Globalization and the Posthuman Object (Bloomsbury 2017). I have published articles in/edited special issues of journals such as Screen, Yale French Studies, Diacritics, and Children's Literature. I am on the advisory boards of the journals French Screen Studies, French Cultural Studies, and Studies in European Cinema, and the editorial board of the Film Studies book series at the University of Edinburgh Press. I am currently co-editing a special issue of Film-Philosophy with Catherine Wheatley on The Objects of Cinema, and have also recently begun working in the field of children's literature and cinema.

My most recent book, co-edited with Catherine Wheatley, is Shoe Reels: The History and Philosophy of Footwear in Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), which builds on research into film and material culture for my earlier single-authored book The Cinema of Things: Globalization and the Posthuman Object (Bloomsbury 2017). The Cinema of Things traces the progressive redrawing of the boundaries between human beings and objects in cinematic representations of commodity culture, objectification, and technological supplementation. More recently, I have been working in the field of children's literature and cinema, publishing an article in the journal Children's Literature on witches and the ethics of alterity in Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. I am currently editing (with Catherine Wheatley) a special issue of the journal Film-Philosophy on The Objects of Cinema. I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students in any of the fields outlined in my Biography, including practice-based research (I am also an award-winning children's author).

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