David Desser (born 1953) is emeritus professor of cinema studies at the

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United States. Established in 1867, it is the f ...

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

cinema of Japan The , also known domestically as , has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world; as of 2022, it was the Film industry#Statistics, fourth largest by number of feature films p ...

, 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 simply a faith-based religion, but an orthopraxy and Ethnoreligious group, ethnoreligion, pertaining to deed, ...

. 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

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 Date of birth missing (living people) {{US-academic-bio-stub