Richard Dyer
Professor
Department of Film Studies
University of St Andrews
United Kingdom
Biography
My first degree was in French (with English, German and Philosophy) from St. Andrews and my PhD from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. I taught for many years at the University of Warwick and am now also teaching at King’s College London. My work focuses on issues of representation and entertainment and especially the relations between them: how the form that a representation takes has much to do with its entertainment value, how entertainment works through representations. I have focused especially on the very notion of entertainment, tyring to unpack this common sense construct, and on represenatations of gender, ‘race’ and sexuality. More recently I have focused on Italian cinema and on music and film (including most recently the work of Nino Rota and the use of songs in, mainly, American movies). I am now embarking on a study of the serial killer in European cinema and on La dolce vita.
Research Interest
My work focuses on issues of representation and entertainment and especially the relations between them: how the form that a representation takes has much to do with its entertainment value, how entertainment works through representations.
Publications
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Dyer, RW 2010, The Ending of 8½ (1963). in T Brown & J Walters (eds), Film Moments: Criticism, History, Theory. British Film Institute, pp. 61-64.
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Dyer, RW 2013, The Pervasiveness of Song in Italian Cinema. in L Bayman & S Rigoletto (eds), Popular Italian Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London, pp. 69-81.
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Dyer, RW 2013, White Enough. in Y Tzioumakis & S Lincoln (eds), The Time of Our Lives: Dirty Dancing and Popular Culture. Wayne State University Press, pp. 73-85.
