The Directory of Research and Researchers at Brown: Mary Ann Doane

Mary Ann Doane works in the areas of film theory, feminist film studies, cultural theory, and semiotics. She has written on photography, television, and digital media as well. Currently, she is researching the use of the close-up in film practice and theory, and the way in which screen size and its corresponding scale have figured in the negotiation of the human body's relation to space in modernity. She is also currently editing an issue of "differences" devoted to the concept of indexicality in photography, film, and digital media.

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Mary Ann Doane is George Hazard Crooker Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. In 1996-1997 and 1998-2000 she was Chair of the Department of Modern Culture and Media. She also serves on the Executive Board of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. She has held visiting teaching positions at New York University and the University of Iowa. In 1994 she was Frederic Ives Carpenter Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago and in Spring 2005 she delivered the Christian Gauss Seminar Lectures at Princeton University.

A specialist in film theory, feminist theory and semiotics, Doane holds degrees from Cornell University (B.A. English, summa cum laude, 1974) and the University of Iowa (M.A. Speech and Dramatic Art, 1976; Ph.D. Speech and Dramatic Art, 1979). She is the author of The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Indiana University Press, 1987), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 1991) and The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Harvard UP, 2002). The Desire to Desire has been translated into Japanese and Femmes Fatales has been translated into Italian. Doane also served as co-editor of Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (1984) and of Camera Obscura, no. 20-21: "The Spectatrix" (1989). In addition, she has published a wide range of articles on feminist film theory, sound in the cinema, psychoanalytic theory, sexual and racial difference in film, melodrama and television. Doane is currently working on a book on the close-up and scale in the cinema.

Doane was a member of the Executive Council for The Society for Cinema Studies from 1986 to 1989 and served on the Film Division of the Modern Language Association from 1993-1997. She is a member of the editorial board of Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and an advisory editor for Camera Obscura and Parallax. In 1990-91, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She also received a Wriston Fellowship and a Pembroke Center Faculty Fellowship at Brown in 1982-83. In 2001-2002, she directed the Pembroke Seminar on "Technology and Representation."

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MARY ANN DOANE, Ph.D., The University of Iowa; B.A. Cornell University
Professor of Modern Culture and Media
Modern Culture and Media
Phone: +1 401 863 2807
E-mail: Mary_Ann_Doane@Brown.EDU

Mary Ann Doane's Brown Research URL:
http://research.brown.edu/myresearch/Mary_Ann_Doane

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Research at Brown: The Directory of Research and Researchers at Brown: Research Profile