BRIEF BIO:
Professor Wolfe's areas of research and teaching interest include international film history and criticism; American film and cultural history; historiography; documentary film, photography and new media; comedy; film sound; and adaptation. He is the author of two books on the films of director Frank Capra and has published widely on various aspects of the history of commercial, independent, and documentary filmmaking in the U.S. A former Rockefeller Fellow, he also has served as a consulting scholar for the New York Center for Visual History's American Cinema Project and as a member of the Academic Advisory Council of the American Film Institute. Together with colleague Edward Branigan, he is series co-editor of the American Film Institute's Film Reader Series, which to date has published nineteen volumes of new critical essays on topics of contemporary concern in film, television, and new media studies. He is a past recipient of a UCSB Distinguished Teaching Award and a past chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies.