Brett Bowles

Associate Professor of French Studies

Degree/Institution: PhD Pennsylvania State University
Office: HU 237
Phone: (518) 442-4143
Fax: (518) 442-4111
Email: bbowles@albany.edu

Academic Focus

Twentieth-century French cultural history; film studies; cinema, society, and politics during the Popular Front and Vichy; literature and ideology

Bio

Professor Bowles has an interdisciplinary academic background, combining a BA and MA in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia with a PhD in French Civilization from Pennsylvania State University. He came to UAlbany in January 2006 after spending eight years at Iowa State University.

At UAlbany Professor Bowles teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in the society and culture track of the French Studies program, including AFRE 315 (Introduction to French Cinema), AFRE 355 (Contemporary French Society and Culture), AFRE 415 / 515 (French Cinema and Society), AFRE 405 / 505 (Approaches to French Society and Culture), and AFRE 430 / 530 (Translation). He also offers LLC 275 (European Cinema and Society) in alternating years for the Honors College.

Professor Bowles’ primary research field is twentieth-century social, political, and cultural history through film (fiction and documentary). Supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society, his work has appeared in journals including French Historical Studies, Modern and Contemporary France, The Journal of Modern History, PMLA, French History, The Historical Journal, The Australian Journal of French Studies, and The Historical Journal of Film, Radio, and Television.

In 2009 his book on Marcel Pagnol will be published by Manchester University Press in its “French Film Directors” series. A second manuscript on documentary filmmaker Marcel Ophüls is currently in progress for the University of Illinois Press. Professor Bowles is also guest-editing a thematic issue of the journal Historical Reflections under the title “The Politics of French and German Cinema, 1930-1945” slated for publication in July 2009.

Professor Bowles currently serves on the editorial boards of French History, Modern and Contemporary France (as North American editor), and The Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television (as Book Review editor). Most recently, he has begun working with International Historic Films in Chicago as academic advisor and co-producer of DVDs related to France during the Second World War. In this capacity he contributed multi-media essays to forthcoming editions of Forces Occultes, an anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic propaganda film made in 1942, and Salut à la France, a short docu-drama Jean Renoir made for the American Office of War Information in 1944 to promote American-British-French solidarity just prior to D-Day.

Publications

Curriculum Vitae

Links

International Historic Films http://www.ihffilm.com

Modern and Contemporary France http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713437445

Historical Journal of Film, Radio, Television http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/carfax/01439685.html

Historical Reflections http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/hrrh/index.php

French History http://fh.oxfordjournals.org