Charles Musser

Professor of Film Studies
and American Studies,
Co-Chair, Film Studies Program,
Director of Summer Film Institute
charles.musser@yale.edu

Charles Musser is Co-Chair of the Film Studies Program and Director of the Summer Film Institute. He teaches graduate courses on film historiography, American cinema, and documentary film, video and photography. His The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (1990 ) received the Jay Leyda Prize in Cinema Studies, the Theater Library Association Award for best book on Film, TV and Radio, the Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for outstanding book in Media Studies and other awards. His other books include Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (1991), High-Class Moving Pictures: Lyman H. Howe and the Forgotten Era of Traveling Exhibition, 1880-1920 (with Carol Nelson, 1991), and Edison Motion Pictures, 1890-1900: An Annotated Filmography (1997). Most recently, he co-edited Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era (2001) with Jane Gaines and Pearl Bowser. As a documentary filmmaker, he produced and directed the prize-winning An American Potter (1976) and Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter (1982).