Murray Pomerance

Murray Pomerance is a Canadian film scholar, author, and professor teaching in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University and York University.

He was born in 1946 in Hamilton, Ontario and studied at the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan (with Kenneth Boulding and Theodore Newcomb), the New School for Social Research (with Benjamin Nelson), the State University of New York at Buffalo (with Edgar Z. Friedenberg and Warren Bennis), and York University.

Pomerance has written extensively on film, cinematic experience, and performance, and has also edited and co-edited more than a dozen anthologies exploring cinema. He contributes regularly to print and online publications, including Film International, Senses of Cinema and FLOW. In addition, Pomerance is editor of the “Techniques of the Moving Image” series at Rutgers University Press and the “Horizons of Cinema” series at State University of New York Press and, with Lester D. Friedman and Adrienne L. McLean respectively, co-editor of both the “Screen Decades” and “Star Decades” series at Rutgers University Press.

He is on the editorial board of Rodopi’s Contemporary Cinema series, the THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, and In Short: The Journal of Small Screen Studies. His book Johnny Depp Starts Here has been translated into the French as Ici Commence Johnny Depp (tr. Pauline Soulat; Éditions Capricci 2010), and into the German as Johnny Depp: Betrachtungen zu einem Schauspieler (tr. Andrea Rennschmid; Reinhard Weber Verlag 2006)

Pomerance also writes fiction, and is a 1992 O. Henry Award winner. His work has appeared in New Directions, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, Chelsea, Confrontation, and Descant. He is the author, as well, of Ludwig Bemelmans: A Bibliography (Heineman, 1993).

In 1995, Pomerance founded the Media Studies Working Group with John Sakeris at Ryerson University. The group hosted three international conferences from 1996 to 2000, which ultimately resulted in three books: Pictures of a Generation on Hold: Selected Papers (Media Studies Working Group 1996), Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot! Essays on Guns and Popular Culture (Pearson Education 1999), and Closely Watched Brains (Pearson Education 2001). The group also published Mustafa Koc and Roderick John MacRae’s Working Together: Civil Society Working for Food Security in Canada (2001).

Pomerance has also been involved in film production, appearing in Brandon Cronenberg’s Broken Tulips (2008), and acting, writing, and composing for R. Bruce Elder’s Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World (1985). In the summer of 2009, he appeared on Broadway in conjunction with a performance of The 39 Steps. In August 2013, his co-authored commentary (with R. Barton Palmer) appeared on the Criterion DVD of John Frankenheimer's Seconds."

• Moment of Action: Riddles of Cinematic Performance (forthcoming, Rutgers 2016)
• Marnie (BFI 2014)
• The Eyes Have It: Cinema and the Reality Effect (Rutgers 2013)
• Alfred Hitchcock's America (Polity Press 2013)
• Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema (University of California Press 2011)
• The Horse Who Drank the Sky: Film Experience Beyond Narrative and Theory (Rutgers University Press 2008)
• Johnny Depp Starts Here (Rutgers 2005)
• An Eye for Hitchcock (Rutgers 2004)

Edited Works

• The Last Laugh: Strange Humors of Cinema (Wayne State, 2013)
• Shining in Shadows: Movie Stars of the 2000s (Rutgers 2012)
• A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home (Wallflower 2008)
• City That Never Sleeps: New York and the Filmic Imagination (Rutgers 2007)
• Cinema and Modernity (Rutgers 2006)
• American Cinema of the 1950s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers 2005)
• BAD: Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen (State University of New York Press 2004)
• Enfant Terrible! Jerry Lewis in American Film (New York University Press 2002)
• Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls: Gender in Film at the End of the Twentieth Century (State University of New York Press 2001)

Co-edited Works

• Thinking in the Dark: Cinema, Theory, Practice (with R. Barton Palmer; Rutgers University Press 2015)
• George Cukor: Hollywood Master (with R. Barton Palmer; Edinburgh University Press 2015)
• Hollywood's Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (with Daniel Bernardi, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson; Wayne State 2012)
• A Little Solitaire: John Frankenheimer and American Film (with R. Barton Palmer; Rutgers University Press 2011)
• From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (with Ernest Mathijs; Rodopi 2006)
• Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth (with Frances Gateward; Wayne State 2005)
• Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood (with Frances Gateward; Wayne State 2002)
• Popping Culture (with John Sakeris; 7 editions 2003-2012, Boston: Pearson Education)

Fiction

• The Economist (Oberon Press 2014)
• Tomorrow (Oberon Press 2012)
• Edith Valmaine (Oberon Press 2010)
• Savage Time (Oberon Press 2005)
• Magia d’Amore (Sun and Moon 1999)
• The Complete Partitas (Les Trois O 1992-1995)

• "Murray Pomerance's Page". Ryerson.ca. 2005-02-01. Retrieved 2013-12-10.