Michael Cowan is a film and media historian, as well as a Germanist, who joined the Department of Cinematic Arts following previous appointments at McGill University and the University of St. Andrews. He is best known as a scholar of Weimar cinema, but has additional interests in European cinema, media history, visual culture, sensory studies and the avant-garde.

His publications include three monographs, several edited collections and articles in journals such as Art History, Cinema Journal, NECSUS, New German Critique, October and Screen. He currently sits on the executive committee of Domitor (Society for the Study of Early Cinema), the steering committee of NECS (European Network of Cinema and Media Studies), and the editorial board of the Canadian journal Intermédialités.

Michael is the recipient of numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including most recently a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2018-2019) for work on his current project examining the emergence of film societies.

Selected Publications

• “Public Advertising Screens and the Ambivalence of Interactivity,” forthcoming in Grenzenlose Werbung – zwischen Konsum und Audiovision, ed. Karin Moser, Franz Eder and Mario Keller (De Gruyter, 2020)
• “Interactive Media and Imperial Subjects: Excavating the Cinematic Shooting Gallery,” NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies (spring 2018): https://necsus-ejms.org/interactive-media-and-imperial-subjects-excavating-the-cinematic-shooting-gallery/
• “Productive City: Walter Ruttmann’s City Films after 1933,” in The City Symphony Phenomenon (1920-1940): Cinema, Avant-garde, and Urban Modernity, ed. Eva Hielscher and Stephen Jacobs and Anthony Kinik (NY: Routledge, 2018), 56-66
• The Promise of the Cinema: German Film Theory 1907-1933, co-edited with Anton Kaes and Nicholas Baer (University of California Press, 2016), 685pp. Winner of Limina Award for Best International Film Studies Book and the SCMS Award of Distinction for Best Edited Collection
• “Learning to Love the Movies: Puzzles, Participation and Cinephilia in Interwar European Film Magazines,” Film History 27.4 (2016), 1-45
• “The Realm of the Earth: Broadcast Technologies and World Politics in Interwar European Cinema,” Intermédialités, no. 23 (2015):
• Walter Ruttmann and the Cinema of Multiplicity: Avant-Garde – Advertising – Modernity (Amsterdam University Press / University of Chicago Press, 2014, reprinted 2016), 255pp. Winner of the Willy Haas Prize for best monograph on German film; Honourable Mention for British Association of Film, Television and Screen Studies Book Award, 2015; finalist for the Kraszna Krausz Book Award in the category of moving image
• “Taking it to the Street: Screening the Advertising Film in Weimar Cinema,” Screen 54:4 (2013), 463-479. Winner of the BAFTSS best article award, 2015
• Hans Richters Rhythmus 21. Schlüsselfilm der Moderne, co-edited with members of BTWH: The Emergence of German Modernity (Königshausen & Neumann, 2013), 218pp.
• “The Ambivalence of Ornament: Silhouette Advertisements in Print and Film in Early Twentieth-Century Germany,” Art History 36:4 (September 2013), 784-809
• “Absolute Advertising: Walter Ruttmann and the Weimar Advertising Film,” Cinema Journal 52:4 (2013), 49-73. Winner of the SCMS Kovács Essay Award
• Technology’s Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism (School of Advanced Study, University of London, 2012), 242pp.
• “Moving Picture Puzzles: Training Perception in the Weimar ‘Rebus’ Films,” Screen 51 (2010), 197-218. Honourable mention, Kovács Essay Award, SCMS, 2012
• “Advertising, Rhythm and the Filmic Avant-Garde in Weimar,” October 131 (2010), 23-50
• “Rethinking the City Symphony in the Digital Era: Harun Farocki and the City Film,” Intermédialités no. 11, special issue on Harun Farocki, ed. Philippe Despoix (2009): 69-86
• “Between the Street and the Apartment. Disturbing the Spaces of Fortress Europe in Michael Haneke,” Studies in European Cinema 5 (2008), 117-131
• Cult of the Will: Nervousness and German Modernity (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 360pp.