Linda Williams papers (Ms.2015.011)

Biographical/Historical note

Linda Williams is a PhD, Professor in Film & Media and Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. Her academic interest centers on Feminist Theory and “body genres,” genres designed to elicit a specific physical reaction. These include pornography, melodrama, and horror. Other areas of focus in both research and teachings include “race” films, Oscar Micheaux, Spike Lee, Surrealist cinema, David Lynch, Pedro Almodóvar, Luis Buñuel, film theory, musicals, and the HBO series “The Wire."

She earned her PhD at the University of Colorado in 1977. She taught at The University of Illinois from 1977 to 1989, first as an Assistant Professor of English, and then in 1984 as an Associate Professor of English. Her first position as a Professor of Film Studies was at The University of California, Irvine from 1989 to 1997. She has worked at the University of California, Berkeley since 1997 and has been their Director of Program in Film Studies since July 1999.

In 1989 she published her groundbreaking study of pornographic film entitled, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (second edition 1999). This pioneering text on moving-image pornography took a serious look at the history and form of this most prevalent of genres. Other books include a psychoanalytic study of Surrealist cinema (Figures of Desire, 1981), a co-edited volume of feminist film criticism (Re-vision, 1984), Viewing Positions (1993), Screening Sex (2008), Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White, from Uncle Tom to OJ Simpson (2001), and On the Wire (2014), a study of the HBO television series. She has also edited a collection of essays on pornography called Porn Studies (Duke, 2004).

She received Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004 and in 2011 was appointed Faculty Research Lecturer. In 2013 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

In part modified from http://filmmedia.berkeley.edu/faculty-profile/linda-williams