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When David Bordwell died in 2024, he left behind a legacy of film scholarship and criticism whose influence is unmatched. Coauthor of a pair of textbooks adopted across the globe and the main force behind a blog read by thousands, Bordwell has influenced generations of film students, filmmakers, and film critics. Observing Film Art examines the breadth of Bordwell’s work through the perspectives of those who knew him best, collaborators, former students, and critics among them. This is the first collection devoted to the work of Bordwell, and it gives equal attention to each facet of his prodigious scholarship, structured to highlight his interest in theory, history, and analysis and criticism. The cornerstones of his approach to film study, including formalism, cognitivism, and historical poetics, are all examined in detail, as are key works, including The Classical Hollywood Cinema (coauthored with Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger) and Narration in the Fiction Film. 

Finding strategies for today’s environmental movement in classic science fiction films

What can science fiction film tell us about the course of the modern ecological movement? On Life Support traces how the environmental concerns of the 1970s were embedded in the eco-dystopian cinema of the era—and considers its implications for ecological thought and activism today.

Illuminating the patterns that shape our thinking about nonhuman nature, Matthew I. Thompson pairs iconic films such as Soylent Green and Silent Running with the transformational environmentalist texts that inspired them and kick-started the modern environmental movement, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Thompson examines this confluence of literature and cinema to show how, as they translated environmentalism for Hollywood’s audiences, these movies distilled the movement’s concepts into a form that revealed their inherent contradictions.

A sensitive analysis of the tensions that complicate environmentalist praxis—especially between desire and fear in the activist impulse—On Life Support offers a timely critique of the politics of environmental containment and control, calling instead for a politics of interconnection and contamination. It is, after all, by inviting complexity and chaos that we begin to undermine the myth of human mastery, letting nature flourish on its own terms.

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Winner of the 2024 Association of American Publishers PROSE Award for Music and Performing Arts

Since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, American music theory has been framed and taught almost exclusively by white men. As a result, whiteness and maleness are woven into the fabric of the field, and BIPOC music theorists face enormous hurdles due to their racial identities. In On Music Theory, Philip Ewell brings together autobiography, music theory and history, and theory and history of race in the United States to offer a black perspective on the state of music theory and to confront the field’s white supremacist roots. Over the course of the book, Ewell undertakes a textbook analysis to unpack the mythologies of whiteness and western-ness with respect to music theory, and gives, for the first time, his perspective on the controversy surrounding the publication of volume 12 of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. He speaks directly about the antiblackness of music theory and the antisemitism of classical music writ large and concludes by offering suggestions about how we move forward. Taking an explicitly antiracist approach to music theory, with this book Ewell begins to create a space in which those who have been marginalized in music theory can thrive.

Winner of the 2022 Peter C. Rollins Book Prize, Northeast Popular Culture Association (NEPCA)

In the postwar era, the police procedural series Dragnet informed Americans on the workings of the criminal justice system and instructed them in their responsibilities as citizens.

Among shifting politics, tastes, and technology in television history, one genre has been remarkably persistent: the cop show. Claudia Calhoun returns to Dragnet, the pioneering police procedural and an early transmedia franchise, appearing on radio in 1949, on TV and in film in the 1950s, and in later revivals. More than a popular entertainment, Dragnet was a signifier of America’s postwar confidence in government institutions—and a publicity vehicle for the Los Angeles Police Department.

Only the Names Have Been Changed shows how Dragnet’s “realistic” storytelling resonated across postwar culture. Calhoun traces Dragnet’s “semi-documentary” predecessors, and shows how Jack Webb, Dragnet’s creator, worked directly with the LAPD as he produced a series that would likewise inspire public trust by presenting day-to-day procedural justice, rather than shootouts and wild capers. Yet this realism also set aside the seething racial tensions of Los Angeles as it was. Dragnet emerges as a foundational text, one that taught audiences to see police as everyday heroes not only on TV but also in daily life, a lesson that has come under scrutiny as Americans increasingly seek to redefine the relationship between policing and public safety.

This volume collects original essays on Hungarian-German playwright and screenwriter George Tabori (1914–2007) and his remarkable contributions to the stage. Tabori, a Jewish refugee and a truly transnational author, was best known for his work in New York theater that irreverently explored the Jewish experience, particularly the Holocaust. Although his illustrious career spanned a century, two continents, several languages, and a variety of literary genres, Tabori’s work has received scant attention in American letters, in spite of its significance for U.S. theater and Holocaust studies.

Until Tabori, most dramas about the Holocaust were either rooted in American domestic realism, striving to create a strong empathetic connection between the audience and Holocaust victims, or featured an unembellished documentary style. Tabori staked out a third position, beyond realism and documentation. The volume brings together the voices of international scholars to provide a comprehensive introduction to Tabori’s theater as well as in-depth analyses of his work, discussing all of his major plays. Individual essays address Tabori’s postdramatic theater in relation to sacrificial ritual, performance studies, and post-humanist approaches to the contemporary stage, as well as performance aspects of his productions, questions of ethics and aesthetics raised by his theater, and his plays’ relation to Holocaust representation in popular culture.

An exploration of the fundamental relationship between opera and urban modernity in three iconic cities: London, Paris, and New York.

At the end of the nineteenth century, London, Paris, and New York were quintessential modern metropolises and vital centers for opera. In Operatic Infrastructures, Flora Willson examines opera’s roots in the material worlds of these cities. Reaching beyond histories of opera as spectacle, she investigates the physical underpinnings of opera at the century’s end as an inter-urban, multimedia network. 

Operatic Infrastructures considers emergent technologies such as the telephone and the subway, but it also retrieves the hidden, forgotten, and otherwise effaced traces of systems such as storage facilities and colonial trade routes. It takes seriously the mundane aspects of materiality, from the blandest clichés of newspaper columns to the fine print of insurance certificates. In doing so, the book reveals just how far these interfaces with modern urban life reached into opera’s own systems of meaning-making and performance in the 1890s—making it impossible to demarcate neatly between “opera” and its “context.” Without such operatic infrastructures, Willson shows, there would be no opera at all.

This volume celebrates the work of Ousmane Sembène, the brilliant African filmmaker and writer. Since the 1950s, working in his native Senegal, Sembène has produced a series of films and novels that incisively depict the realities of contemporary African experience, particularly that of urban and industrial Africa. The book begins with critical essays on Sembène’s oeuvre by Frederick Ivor Case, Françoise Pfaff, Mbye Cham, and Claire Andrade-Warkins. There follows a series of presentations by distinguished black writers who discuss their craft and the ways in which language can function as a political act of cultural legitimation. These writers include Toni Cade Bambara, Earl Lovelace, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, John Edgar Wideman, and Sembène. 

The next section reproduces Sembène’s remarks on his film Camp de Thiaroye and an extended interview he recorded in Toronto in 1992. His comments are presented in both French and English. The volume concludes with annotated bibliographies of Sembène’s novels and of the films he has written and directed.

From the Grand Ole Opry to the National Barn Dance, how radio changed life in rural America

Out of the Dark: A History of Radio and Rural America shows how radio—especially clear channel network stations—brought news, markets, weather, religion, and entertainment into isolated farm homes between the 1920s and 1950s, narrowing rural–urban divides while also sustaining distinctly rural tastes (e.g., barn dance music). Craig argues that battery “farm radios,” high power stations, and national networking transformed daily life, work rhythms, consumer habits, and political participation, making radio the central domestic technology of the Depression era and beyond. 

Craig blends regulatory and industry milestones, such as the Radio Act of 1927, with sociological studies, USDA extension records, FCC surveys, census tables, and rich case studies including WLS Chicago’s “National Barn Dance,” WSM Nashville’s “Grand Ole Opry,” and others. He mines audience research, diaries, program schedules, and tables that track the spread of radio. The book’s distinctive contributions include detailed charts (ownership by region; clear channel assignments) and vivid narratives of stations, formats, and personalities that connected farm families to national culture while preserving local identity. 

The book is ideal for scholars and students of US social, rural, and media history; communication policy and political communication; country and bluegrass music history; agricultural extension; and American studies. It will also engage librarians, curators, and public historians seeking context for rural collections; journalists and podcasters tracing the roots of today’s information ecosystems; and general readers interested in how radio re made community life long before the internet.

How does serial drama earn, keep, and reward our attention for so long—over episodes, seasons, months, and years? While we know that characters are the focus of story and viewer interest in television fiction, scholars have for decades overlooked the way those characters are performed on-screen and the lure of performance as a key formal and thematic aspect of long-form television storytelling. In Over and Over, Elliott Logan offers close readings of performance in some of the most celebrated television dramas of the century, casting new light on the attractions and significance of the medium’s seriality. The book shows how the patterning and expressive resonance of performers on-screen binds together otherwise unconnected episodes of shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men. In doing so, it highlights the provisionality of identity and meaning as crucial to their interest in the sustenance of human relationships over long periods of time. In accounting for the resonance of performance over time in serial drama, this book shows, we find the terms of our own attachment to its compelling depictions of human life