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Biography
Charles Wolfe is Professor Emeritus of Film and Media Studies. His research and teaching interests include film history and theory; historiography; American cinema and cultural history; documentary film and photography; comedy; screen adaptation; and the history of early film sound. 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 films, with a focus in recent years on Buster Keaton and California Slapstick, and the comic entanglements of different spatial and historiographical logics in this genre. With his late colleague Edward Branigan, he co-founded and served as series editors of the American Film Institute’s AFI Film Readers (Routledge), which between 1989 and 2021 published 41 volumes of new critical essays on topics of emerging concern in film, television, and digital media studies. Viewed in composite, the AFI Film Readers series charted new paradigms for scholarly inquiry in cinema and media studies over the course of three decades.
Wolfe received the Outstanding Pedagogy Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2011, a Distinguished Teaching Award from the UCSB Academic Senate and Alumni Association in 1987, a Professor of the Year Award from the UCSB Mortar Board/Senior Class Council in 1992, and an Outstanding Faculty Award from the UCSB Office of Residential Life in 2001. He chaired the Department of Film and Media Studies from 1994 to 1998, during which time plans were launched for the construction of UCSB’s Pollock Theater, now the region’s premier public screening venue and current home to the public programs of the Carsey-Wolf Center.
Wolfe served as Associate Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts in the College of Letters and Science at UCSB from 2003 to 2008, and as the Interim Co-Director of the Carsey Wolf Center in 2015-2016. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies from 2006 to 2009, and has served as a Rockefeller Fellow at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, a scholarly advisor to the New York Center for Visual History American Cinema Project, a member of the Advisory Board of the San Francisco Film Festival, and a member of the advisory or editorial boards of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Studies in Documentary Film.