Peter Wollen was an English film theorist and filmmaker. He studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. Both political journalist and film theorist, Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) helpe…
Jean Baudrillard was a French sociologist, philosopher and poet, with interest in cultural studies. He is best known for his analyses of media, contemporary culture, and technological communication, a…
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Mar…
David Raymond Sedaris is an American humorist, comedian, author, and radio contributor. He was publicly recognized in 1992 when National Public Radio broadcast his essay "Santaland Diaries". He publis…
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer. He is best known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, a stand-in for Lafayette County where he spe…
Mike Davis was a titan of radical scholarship, a "Marxist-Environmentalist" whose work redefined urban theory and California history. Born in Fontana and raised in the working-class community of Bosto…
James Mallahan Cain (July 1, 1892–October 27, 1977) was an American journalist and novelist. Although Cain himself vehemently opposed labeling, he is usually associated with the hard-boiled school of …
John Richard Hersey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer, earliest practiced the "new journalism," which fuses storytelling devices of the novel with nonfiction reportage. A 36-member panel under…
Jonathan Crary is an art critic and essayist and is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University in New York. His first notable works were Techniques of the Observer: On Vi…
Rachel Cusk was born in Canada, and spent some of her childhood in Los Angeles, before her family returned to England, in 1974, when Cusk was 8 years old. She read English at New College, Oxford.
Junot Díaz was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in New Jersey. He is the author of the critically acclaimed Drown; The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and …
The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won…
Laura Mulvey is an English feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She worked at…
Most famous for his 1962 essay "Notes on the Auteur theory" which popularized this film criticism technique in America. He wrote for the Village Voice criticing films and literature before bringing th…
Jeanine Basinger holds a BS and MS from South Dakota State University. She is a film historian, professor of Film Studies at Wesleyan University and curator and founder of The Cinema Archives at Wesle…
Ioannis "Yanis" Varoufakis is a Greek-Australian economist and politician. A former academic, he has been Secretary-General of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25), a left-wing pan-European …
Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos (1741-1803) was a French novelist, official and army general, best known for writing the epistolary novel Les Liaisons dangereuses.
Henrik Johan Ibsen was a major Norwegian playwright largely responsible for the rise of modern realistic drama. He is often referred to as the "father of modern drama." Ibsen is held to be the greates…
Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss of memory, and identity (both personal and collective) and decay (of …
David Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicol…
