Assistant Professor of German and European Cinema

Ph.D., University of Mannheim, Germany, 1996
M.A., University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 1990

Email - ocspeck@vcu.edu
Phone - 804.827.0910
Fax - 804.828.0127

Office - Lafayette Hall, Room 110                312 N. Shafer St.
             Richmond, VA 23284-2021

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Dr. Oliver C. Speck taught at the University of North Carolina Wilmington prior to joining VCU in 2007. His areas of expertise are film studies, especially European Cinema, and German language and literature. His teaching interests also include genre studies and cultural studies.

Prof. Speck’s scholarly writing focuses on narrative strategies and the representation of memory and history in French, German and other European cinema. In his first book, Der unter-sagte Blick: Zum Problem der Subjektivität im Film (The Under-written Gaze: The Problem of Subjectivity in Film) published in 1999, he discusses the value and limits of models of narratology, of Freudian psychoanalysis and of the “dispositif”-theory, aspects of the latter not having been discussed in Germany up to then.

The structural analyses and fundamental problematic of subjectivity found in The Under-written Gaze receive amplification and a fresh focus in Prof. Speck’s new book project, whose working title is “Creating Perspectives: Reexamining Concepts of Identity in European Cinema.” Here, he explores the generic identity of national cinema and address the question of whether we can still talk about “European Cinemas” without pleonasms and without implicitly abetting reactionary impulses. This book of in-depth-analyses will build awareness of the complex issues involving films that deal with national identity. A new theoretical model will emerge that can be applied to other cinemas, including postcolonial cinema. Oliver Speck was recently invited to teach a research seminar on his book project at the University of Warwick, UK. Currently, he is also co-editing a volume on New Austrian Cinema.