Jennifer Bean

Jennifer M. Bean is Associate Chair of Comparative Literature and Director of the Cinema and Media Studies programs. She has published widely on silent-era cinema, including her recent collections Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space(forthcoming, Indiana UP), Flickers of Desire: Movie Stars of the 1910s (Rutgers UP, 2011), A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (Duke UP, 2002) and a special issue of Camera Obscura on “Early Women Stars,” (2001), both with Diane Negra. She is currently writing a book on the geopolitical implications of an “imagination of mass culture” shaped by multi-media interactivity in the early twentieth century. Her investment in silent-era film preservation and restoration agendas has led to her advisory work for the Women and Film History International Project, the Thanhouser Film Company Preservation, Inc., Turner Classic Movies, and the National Film Preservation Foundation; her voice-over on various restored films from the early period of cinema can be heard on two DVD-anthologies, More Treasures from The Film Archives (2004), andTreasures III: Social Issues in Early American Cinema (2007). At the University of Washington, she teaches courses in film theory, genre, historiography, documentary, and analysis.