Tisch School of the Arts is pleased to welcome Fall 2016 Visiting Faculty member Linda Williams as the first ever Tisch Scholar-in-Residence. In addition to teaching a graduate course on melodrama in the Department of Cinema Studies, Professor Williams will participate in a number of course visits and special events throughout the semester, including organizing a discussion on the timely topic of trigger warnings and safe spaces in higher education.
Linda Williams is Emeritus Faculty at the Univerisity of California, Berkeley in the Department of Film and Media where she teaches courses on popular moving-image genres (pornography, melodrama, and “body genres” of all sorts). She has also taught courses on Oscar Micheaux and Spike Lee, Luis Bunuel and Pedro Almodovar, film theory, selected “sex genres,” and The Wire. Her books include Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible/ (second edition 1999), Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (2001, Princeton). She has edited a collection of essays on pornography, Porn Studies (Duke, 2004). Her most recent books are Screening Sex (Duke, 2008), a history of the revelation and concealment of sex at the movies and On The Wire (Duke 2014).