Dudley Andrew
Biography
Dudley Andrew studied English and Philosophy, then learned filmmaking before getting in on the ground floor just as Film Studies was taking off in the USA. His dissertation on film theorist André Bazin has funded several of his books, and has taken him frequently to France where he wrote two large histories of 1930s culture during the Popular Front era. Andrew taught Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at Iowa for years, directing the dissertations of many of today’s leaders in Film. Coming to Yale in 2000, he chaired Comp Lit from 2009-2013. In the department he works with graduate students primarily on the French literary and philosophical milieu, or on issues that cross between Cinema and Literature (aesthetics, translation, hermeneutics, critical theory). He has consistently taught undergraduate courses in World Cinema and in adaptation, as well as seminars related to the work of Bazin, whose complete works he curates in a dedicated archive at Yale. Andrew provides a link to French film history from having had personal encounters with Truffaut, Renoir, Resnais, Rohmer and other key figures. He is an “officier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres” and received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.
Education
B.A. University of Notre Dame, 1967
MFA Columbia University, 1969
Ph.D. University of Iowa, 1972
Research Interests
French Literary, Cinematic, and Philosophical Culture 1919–1989; Aesthetics and Hermeneutics; Adaptation and Translation; Film Theory and Criticism; World Film (Asia, Europe, Africa).
Publication Highlights
Opening Bazin (edited with introduction), Oxford University Press.
Winner, SCMS best Anthology Award for 2011
What Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and its Charge, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
French edition (SIC), 2014; Arabic, 2014; Chinese, 2015.
Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (with Stephen Ungar), Harvard University Press, 2005.
Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Cinema, Princeton University Press, 1995.
Works in Progress
Postwar French Intellectual Culture in the light of Cinema
French Cinema, a very short introduction