Richard Abel (cultural historian)

Richard Abel is Professor Emeritus of International Film and Media in the Department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan. He is a specialist in the history of early cinema and pioneered the academic study of French silent cinema in the United States. Abel has authored numerous books and articles on a wide variety of topics including the rise and eclipse of French cinema, the early history of the U.S. cinema industry, early film exhibition, the emergence of film culture, the contributions of early women writers and critics, and, more recently, the role of early westerns in re-enacting settler colonialism.

Born in Canton, Ohio, Abel obtained an undergraduate degree in English at Utah State University. He then pursued graduate studies in comparative literature at the University of Southern California where he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on T.S. Eliot. Prior to coming to the University of Michigan, Abel taught for many years at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. He also served successively as Director of Drake's Cultural Studies Program and of its Center for the Center of Humanities. In 2012, he moved to the University of Michigan where he served as the Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Screen Arts and Cultures (now the Department of Film, Television, and Media). He was also the Department's Chair and Director of its Graduate Program.

Although starting out in comparative literature, Abel's interests gradually shifted from comparative literature into film studies. In 1984, he published his first monograph, French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 with Princeton University Press.^[1] As a follow-up, he edited a two-volume anthology on French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907-1939 and published it with Princeton in 1988.^[2][3] His second major study on French silent cinema, The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914, was published by University of California Press in 1996.^[4]

Abel then published two studies on how American cinema eclipsed the economic predominance of French cinema in the U.S. and became a formative influence on American cultural identity. The first, The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910, published by University of California Press in 1999, showed how French studios gradually lost their domination of the American market in cinema's first decade. The second study, Americanizing the Movies and 'Movie-Mad' Audiences (University of California Press, 2006) showed how movies came to play a significant role in the construction of American identity in the pre-WWI period.

He has presented several anthologies of French texts translated in English including Colette's first review about The Cheat, Louis Delluc's critics, and Marcel L'Herbier's manifesto. He won the Theatre Library Association Award in 1985, 1995 and 2006.^[5]

• Abel, Richard The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 University of California Press, 1999
• Abel, Richard, ed. French Film Theory and Criticism. Two volumes. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988.
• Abel, Richard, ed. French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

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