Michael Richardson

Professor and Director of the Screen Cultures Program, World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
School: School of Humanities and Sciences
Phone: 607-274-3559
Office: Muller Faculty Center 432, Ithaca, NY 14850
Specialty: 20th and 21st century German literature and cinema, Holocaust Studies, Screen Studies

Michael D. Richardson has been a member of the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures since 1998. He is the inaugural director of the Program in Screen Cultures. His research interests encompass 20th- and 21st-century German literature, theater, and film, from the Weimar Republic to contemporary Germany as well as contemporary world cinema. His current research focuses on three areas: constructions of history in recent German cinema, Holocaust cinema, and the image of Hitler in American and German popular culture. He is the author of Revolutionary Theater and The Classical Heritage: Inheritance and Appropriation from Weimar to the GDR (2007), and coeditor of A New History of German Cinema (2012) and Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, and Memory (2008).  His essays have appeared in Telos, Colloquia Germanica, New German Critique, Stanford Literature Review, and in several anthologies. He is also a member of the editorial board of New German Critique.

Having served as a European Film Consultant and a regular Event and Talkback moderator, presenter, and discussant for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF), Dr. Richardson has also recently been named co-director of FLEFF, along with Dr. Andrew Utterson.

Current and Recent Courses

  • Global Screen Cultures
  • History of German Film
  • Film and the Holocaust
  • Global Screen Cultures
  • Disasters, Dystopia, and the End of the World
  • Imagining Hitler
  • Modern German Drama: Controversial Plays of the 20th Century

Program in Screen Cultures

The Program in Screen Cultures is a new, interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of Humanities and Sciences and the Roy H. Park School of Communications. For inquiries and more information, visit the homepage for Screen Cultures.