ABSTRACT
David Bordwell was born on 23 July 1947. He received his BA in English from the State University of New York at Albany in 1969, then moved to the University of Iowa to pursue graduate work in Speech and Dramatic Arts with a concentration in Film. He received his PhD in 1974, completing a dissertation on French impressionist cinema (published in 1980). In 1997, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen. After receiving his PhD, Bordwell taught in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, retiring as Jacques Ledoux Professor of Film Studies. He has also been a visiting professor at New York University and the University of Iowa. Bordwell has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He earned two awards at the University of Wisconsin for excellence in teaching, as well as the Theatre Library Association Award for Outstanding Book in Film, Broadcasting, or Recorded Performance (for Bordwell 1993), the Anthology Film Archive Award for Film Preservation, and the Hong Kong Film Festival/Asian Film Forum Award for Excellence in Film Scholarship. He is the author or coauthor of sixteen books – with translations (published or forthcoming) into Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Hungarian, French, Persian, Italian, Slovenian, Greek, Japanese, Croatian, and Turkish – and over one hundred and thirty articles. He has been interviewed dozens of times for various media. He has delivered lecture series in Hong Kong, Beijing, Brussels, Budapest, Helsinki, Munich, Bruges, Cologne, and elsewhere – including the prestigious Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton University. He is married to film critic, theorist, and historian, Kristin Thompson; they have collaborated on three books.
