Dennis Hanlon

Biography

I am a specialist in Latin American, South Asian, and European (especially German) cinemas, and my research explores the transnational articulations among them. For the period of the 1960s-1980s, my work is most concerned with politically-committed film movements; with contemporary cinema, I am most interested in the transnational circulation and mutation of genre films, especially those, like gangster films, that lend themselves to political readings. I am presently co-authoring a monograph on Indian director Manmohan Desai that explores authorship in popular Hindi cinema. Other current projects include a book chapter revealing the influence of New Latin American Cinema on Bengali Third Cinema filmmaker Mrinal Sen and an article on the Chile films of the East German documentarians Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann. Future projects include a reception study of Latin American revolutionary cinema in the two Cold War Germanys and a study of contemporary international gangster films that will use World-Systems Theory to map transnational flows of films and film styles. Other areas of interest include Marxist aesthetics and film, ethnographic film, indigenous video, experimental film, and landscape and film. I received my PhD in Film Studies in 2009 from the University of Iowa, which honoured my dissertation, written under the direction of Prof. Kathleen Newman, with the Graduate Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2011. I am currently co-director, with Dr Joshua Yumibe, of the department’s post-graduate research program.

Research Interest

I am a specialist in Latin American, South Asian, and European (especially German) cinemas, and my research explores the transnational articulations among them.