David Desser (born 1953) is emeritus professor of

cinema studies Film theory is a set of scholarly approaches within the academic discipline of film or cinema studies that began in the 1920s by questioning the formal essential attributes of motion pictures; and that now provides conceptual frameworks for un ...

at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Un ...

and former director of that university's Unit for Cinema Studies. He is an expert in Asian cinema, particularly the

cinema of Japan The has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2021, it was the fourth largest by number of feature films produced. In 2011 Japan produced 411 feature films that e ...

, as well as in

Jewish cinema Jewish culture is the culture of the Jewish people, from its formation in ancient times until the current age. Judaism itself is not a faith-based religion, but an orthoprax and ethnoreligion, pertaining to deed, practice, and identity. Jew ...

. He is the former editor of ''

Cinema Journal The ''Journal of Cinema and Media Studies'' (formerly ''Cinema Journal'' and ''The Journal of the Society of Cinematologists'') is the official academic journal of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (formerly the Society for Cinema Studies). ...

'', which is published by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the world's largest organization of scholars of cinema and media. He is currently co-editor of the ''Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema''.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Desser, David American film historians American male non-fiction writers Living people 1953 births American Japanologists University of Illinois faculty Academic journal editors Historians of Jews and Judaism