David Gerstner

Professor
Center for the Arts (1P) room 232A
Telephone: (718) 982-2546
David.Gerstner (at) csi.cuny.edu

Professor Gerstner is a member of the Doctoral Faculty in the Department of Theatre and the Film Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center.

Undergraduate Courses: Cinema 100, Film History, Film Theory, American Myth and Film, German Cinema, Internship and Independent-Study Supervision; Graduate Courses (MA): Research Methods, Genre Studies, Cinema and Ideology, Studies in Film Authorship, History of Media; Graduate Courses (Ph. D.): Aesthetics of Film, Studies in Authorship, Queer Culture, Theory, and Media, Film History.

David A. Gerstner received his Ph. D in the Department of Film and Television at UCLA and is Professor of Cinema Studies. He is author of Manly Arts: Masculinity and Nation in Early American Cinema (Duke University Press, 2006); editor of The Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (Routledge, 2006: selected as "Best of Reference 2007" by the New York Public Library); and co-editor with Janet Staiger of Authorship and Film (Routledge, 2003). His most recent book, Queer Pollen: White Seduction, Black-Male Homosexuality, and the Cinematic is published in the New Black Studies Series with the University of Illinois Press (2011) and was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2012. Co-edited with Cynthia Chris, Media Authorship, will be published by Routledge in early 2013.

His work has appeared in Film Quarterly, The Stanford Humanities Review, Cine-Action, The Velvet Light Trap, Cultural Critique, and Wide Angle. His work may also be read in The Spike Lee Reader (edited by Paula Massood, essay on the Inside Man); City that Never Sleeps (Rutgers University Press, essay on Andy Warhol); Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism (edited by Marc Déimo, also published in French by les press du réel); New Zealand Filmmakers (Wayne State University Press, essay on Peter Wells); two reprinted essays in Vincente Minnelli: The Art of Entertainment (edited by Joe McElhaney); and Hetero (edited by Sean Griffin). His recent essays include "Christophe Honoré's Les Chansons d'amour and the Musical's Queer-abilities" (The Sound of Musicals, edited by Steven Cohan, BFI-Palgrave, 2010) and "American Modern: King Vidor's The Crowd" in The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film, Volume 1: Origins to 1928, edited by Lucia, Grundmann, and Simon, 2012).

For more information please visit David Gerstner's personal bio page.

 

Requests and Guidelines for Student Letters of Recommendation

Read: "Queer Angels of History Take It and Leave It From Behind" (Stanford Humanities Review 7:2 (1999): 150-56.

 

Praise for David Gerstner's work

"Gerstner is a master theorist who renders a compelling and cutting-edge narrative about the complexity of black homosexual desire. The first book of its kind to specifically address the formation of black queer subjectivity in relation to white seduction, Queer Pollen offers a major contribution to African American studies, gender studies, film studies, literary studies, and art history.
- "E. Patrick Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South

Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture is a New York Public Library Best of Reference 2007 Selection

Manly Arts reviewed in Screening the Past and M/C Reviews.

Photo Credit: Jeff Harris