Cinema & Comparative Literature

Steven Ungar

Office: E210B AJB
Phone: (319) 335-1452
steven-ungar@uiowa.edu

Steven Ungar is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature. In French and Italian, he teaches courses on 20th-century French literature and culture.  For CCL, his recent courses have included undergraduate seminars on French film of the 1930s and of the 1950s, a graduate seminar on everyday life in word and image, and an advanced film history course on New Wave France.  He is directing six Ph.D. dissertations.

A book-length essay on Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 will appear in June 2008 in the British Film Institute's “BFI Film Classics” series. Current research projects include a book-length study, Making Waves: French Documenrtary Films and Social Cinema, 1945-1967, a commissioned essay on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante, and an article on Milan Kundera.

In the winter and spring of 2009, Ungar will be Katz Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington.

20th-21st century French fiction, poetry, & thought; first-person narration; everyday life in word & image; North African writing & film; French film of the 1930s; Left-Bank cinema (Resnais, Marker, Varda, & Rouch)

Recent publications:

“Modiano and Sebald: Walking in Another’s Footsteps,” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature, 31, no. 2 (2007)

"Whose Voice? Whose Film?" Jean Rouch, Oumarou Ganda, and Moi, un noir," in Joram Ten Brink, ed., Building Bridges: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (London: Wallflower, 2007)

Review of Tom McDonough, “The Beautiful Language of My Century": Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France, 1945-1968,

in H-France Forum no. 3  (April 2008)