(MENAFN- The Conversation)

• Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of Pittsburgh

Profile Articles Activity

Adam Lowenstein is Director of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also serves as Professor of English and Film and Media Studies. His books include "Horror Film and Otherness" (2022), "Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media" (2015), and "Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film" (2005), all published by Columbia University Press. His book in progress is tentatively titled "The Jewish Horror Film: Taboo and Redemption."

Adam works on issues relating to the cinema as a mode of historical, cultural, and aesthetic confrontation. His teaching and research link these issues to the relays between genre films and art films, cinema and digital media, the politics of spectatorship, and the construction of national cinemas (with particular attention to American, Australian, British, Canadian, French, Israeli, Italian, and Japanese cases). His areas of interest range across surrealism, trauma studies, Jewish studies, and Frankfurt School film and cultural theory.

He is especially invested in horror studies, and is a member of the board of directors for the George A. Romero Foundation. He played a central role in the acquisition of the George A. Romero Collection for Pitt's Horror Studies Archive, an initiative that continues to grow through the University Library System's Department of Archives and Special Collections. He is also currently at work as a co-editor of "The Routledge Companion to Horror," an authoritative transglobal and transmedial guide to horror studies.

Adam has held visiting professorships at Columbia University, New York University, and Tel Aviv University, and received a Macgeorge Fellowship from the University of Melbourne as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He was a fellow at the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan during their "Jewish Visual Cultures" seminar. He has been interviewed on questions of cinema and culture for "The New York Times," Adam Simon's documentary "The American Nightmare," and elsewhere. Through the support of a Global Academic Partnership Grant from Pitt's Global Studies Center, he is the Director of the Global Horror Studies Archival and Research Network. He also serves as the Faculty Fellow for the David C. Frederick Honors College's“Horror Genre as Social Force” scholar community at Pitt.

Experience

• 2025–present Director, Horror Studies Center, University of Pittsburgh
• 1999–present Professor of Film and Media Studies, University of Pittsburgh

Education

• 1999 University of Chicago, PhD
• 1993 University of Virginia, BA

Professional Memberships

• Society for Cinema and Media Studies

Honours

Guggenheim Fellowship; Macgeorge Fellowship; Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Advanced Judaic Studies Fellowship; Howard Foundation Fellowship

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