Richard Dyer studied French at St. Andrews University and was one of the first people to be awarded a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. He taught Film Studies at Warwick University (where he was made the first full Professor of Film Studies in the United Kingdom) and currently teaches Film at King’s College London. He has been a visiting scholar in, among other places, Antwerp, Bergamo, Chicago, Copenhagen, Cornell, Dublin, Gothenburg, Naples, New York (NYU), Pennsylvania (Annenberg School), Rutgers, Salerno, St Andrews, Stanford, Stockholm, SUNY Stony Brook, Weimar and Zürich. His work combines an attention to the aesthetics of entertainment with a concern with social social representation and his books include Stars, Only Entertainment, The Matter of Images, White, Pastiche. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and has received honours from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, University of Turku and the British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies.
He was active in the Gay Liberation Front in Birmingham and a member of the Gay Left Collective. In 1977 he curated the first season anywhere in the world of representations of homosexuality in film at the National Film Theatre in London, which was accompanied by an edited book, Gays in Film, and he has given talks at LGBT film (and other) festivals in, among others, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, Krakow, London, Montreal, New York, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Stockholm, Turku and Turin. He appeared in the film version of Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet. His Now You See It is a historical study of films made by, about and for lesbians and gay men up to the 1980s. His articles on gay male culture were collected in The Culture of Queers (2002).
Mr. Dyer will deliver “The Sissiness of Music in Rope & Tea and Sympathy” on September 10th in New Haven; and “The Angel’s Song: Nino Rota, Music and Film” on September 11th in New York City. Click here for more information.