Professor Robert Burgoyne
Research profile
I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota (summa cum laude) and my doctorate at New York University.
My work centers on historiography and film, with a special emphasis on American cinema, history and national identity, and the counter narratives of nation that have emerged in many films. Recent publications include Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U. S. History: Revised and Expanded Edition and The Epic Film in World Culture. I have also published on memory and contemporary American culture; cinephilia in the work of Douglas Gordon and Corey Arcangel; and the imagery of haunting and spectrality in the war film. Narrative theory, Italian cinema, and the impact of digital technologies on film form and theory are also subjects on which I have published, and which I continue to pursue. Much of my recent work flows from my central interest in the cinematic rewriting of history, and the power of film to illuminate the contemporary moment by reconceiving the dominant fictions that have formed around the past.
See also the PURE research profile.
Research students
I am interested in supervising students working on American film, particularly work that considers the reshaping of cultural memory and national identity in film. I am also interested in projects involving the epic film, the war film, and the biopic. Projects involving narrative theory, digital media, and the prehistory of film are also of interest.
Selected publications
Selected Publications
SCHOLARLY BOOKS PUBLISHED:
The Epic Film in World Culture, ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2010).
Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History: Revised and Expanded Edition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). (First edition published in 1997. Translated into Portuguese).
The Hollywood Historical Film (London and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, March, 2008; second printing, August 2008).
New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Beyond.Co-authored with Robert Stam and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis. (London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall,1992). (Translated into five languages).
Bertolucci's 1900: A Narrative and Historical Analysis (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).
CHAPTERS:
"Prosthetic Memory / Traumatic Memory: Forrest Gump," ed. Marnie Hughes-Warrington, The History on Film Reader. (London: Routledge, 2009). (Republication).
"Customizing Pleasure: ‘Super Mario Clouds' and the John Ford Sky." Cinephilia and Pleasure in the Digital Age, eds Scott Balzerzack and Jason Sperb (London: Wallflower Press, 2008).
"Race and Nation in Glory," in Hollywood and War: The Film Reader, ed. J. David Slocum (New York: Routledge, 2006): 257-270. (Republication).
"From Contested to Consensual Memory: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum" in Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts, eds. Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, (Transaction Press, 2006). (Republication).
"Race and Nation in Glory," in The War Film, ed. Robert Eberwien (Rutgers University Press, 2005): 65-81. (Republication).
"From Contested to Consensual Memory: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum," in Frontiers of Memory, ed. Susannah Radstone and Kate Hodgekins (London: Routledge, 2003): 208-220.
"Memory, History, and Digital Imagery in Contemporary Film," in Memory and Popular Film, ed. Paul Grainge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003): 220-236.
"The Somatization of History in Bertolucci's 1900," in Contemporary Literary Criticism, v. 157 (The Gale Group, 2002). (Republication).
"The Stages of History," in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, ed. Bruce Sklarew, Bonnie Kaufman, Ellen Handler Spitz, and Diane Borden. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998): 223-233. (Republication).
"Modernism and the Narrative of Nation in JFK," in The Persistence of History, ed. Vivian Sobchack (London and New York: Routledge) 1995.
JOURNAL ESSAYS:
"War / Homecoming: The Social Covenant and the Body at Risk in La Guerra è finita," Short Film Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (October 2010).
"Introduction: re-enactment and imagination in the historical film," Leidschrift 24, no. 3 (December 2009): 7-18.
"The Columbian Exchange: Pocahontas and The New World (September, 2009) Screening the Past.
"Super Mario Clouds and the John Ford Sky: Love and Loss in the Work of Douglas Gordon and Cory Arcangel" (August, 2008) TXT Leituras Transdisciplinaires se Telas e Textos (online publication, simultaneously published in English and Portuguese) http://www.letras.ufmg.br./atelaeotexto/revistatxt7artigo_robert.html
"The Balcony of History." Rethinking History 11.4 (Spring, 2008): 547-554.
"Techno-Euphoria and the World-Improving Dream: Gladiator." Ilha do Desterro, A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, no. 51, ed. Anelise R. Corseuil (Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, Spring, 2007): 109-130.
"Ethnic Nationalism and Globalization." Rethinking History 4.2 (Summer, 2000): 157-164.
PRESENTATIONS:
Robert Burgoyne gave an invited lecture to the workshop, "War as Mediated Experience," hosted by the Languages of Emotion study group, Free University of Berlin, October 18. The title of the talk was "Generational Memory and Affect in Letters From Iwo Jima."
John Trafton PhD student, also gave an invited talk to the workshop, "The Incommunicable Experience of War": War Photography and the Soldier Diary in War Documentary Films, In the Year of the Pig (1968) and Restrepo (2010)."
In addition to giving invited lectures, John and Robert also consulted with the members of the workshop at the Free University on their innovative project on the structures of pathos in war films.
Current research
I am currently researching and writing on the war film, with an optic derived from the recent work of Hardt and Negri, Jameson, and Virilio. I consider the war film as a genre of embodiment, a "body genre," that employs sound, image, editing, and camera movement to intensify the affective engagement of the spectator. My premise is that the war film, far from being restricted to the codes of realism and verisimilitude, conveys an intensified somatic experience of combat and trauma that foregrounds the significance of the "body at risk" as the core device of the genre. Reconsidering the war film as a genre of the visceral, I am exploring the way the body is mapped onto systems of ideology, technology, and onto discourses of the phantasmatic and uncanny.