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Amy Villarejo

Chair, Department of FTVDM; Professor

Amy Villarejo was previously the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of Humanities in the Department of Performing and Media Arts and the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she taught from 1997 to 2020.

She has published widely in cinema and media studies, including Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Duke University Press, 2003), which won the Katherine Kovacs award for best book from the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. She is author of Ethereal Queer: Television, Historicity, Desire (Duke University Press, 2013) and Film Studies: The Basics (Routledge, 2013). Recently, she co-editied, with Ron Gregg, The Oxford Handbook to Queer Cinema (Oxford University Press, 2021). Her essays have appeared in a range of peer-reviewed journals including New German CritiqueSocial TextGLQFilm Quarterly and Cinema Journal, now JCMS. She also served on the boards of Film Quarterly and JCMS. She regularly teaches television studies and history, queer media, feminist media studies, the history of global cinema, 3rd cinema and critical theory.

At Cornell, Villarejo served as the director of the Women’s Studies Program (now Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies), the chair of the Department of Performing and Media Arts, and the inaugural director of the Milstein Program in Technology and Humanity.  At UCLA, she became chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media in 2022.

Villarejo grew up in Los Angeles and Davis, earned an A.B. degree from Bryn Mawr College, and received an M.A. and Ph.D. with distinction from the University of Pittsburgh.