Timothy Corrigan is a Professor of English and Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame, and completed graduate work at the University of Leeds, Emory University, and the University of Paris III. Books include The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (Routledge), A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (Routledge), New German Film: The Displaced Image (Indiana UP), Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (Routledge), The Film Experience (Bedford/St. Martin’s), Critical Visions: Readings in Classic and Contemporary Film Theory (Bedford/St. Martin’s, both co-authored with Patricia White), American Cinema of the 2000s (Rutgers UP), and The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford UP), winner of the 2012 Katherine Singer Kovács Award for the outstanding book in film and media studies. Prof Corrigan will give his keynote speech at the ‘World Cinema and the Essay Film’ conference on 1 May about ‘Essayism in Contemporary Film Narrative‘ (Download abstract as PDF).

Thomas Elsaesser is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Media and Culture of the University of Amsterdam. From 2006 to 2012 he was Visiting Professor at Yale University. Besides publishing over 200 essays in journals and collections, he has authored, edited and co-edited some twenty volumes on film history, film theory, German and European cinema, Hollywood, Media Archaeology, New Media and Installation Art. His numerous books have been translated into German, French, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Hebrew, Korean and Chinese. Among his recent books as author are: Terror und Trauma (Berlin: Kadmos, 2007); Film Theory: An Introduction through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2010, with Malte Hagener) and The Persistence of Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2012). His contributions to the essay film includes numerous essays and an edited volume on the recently deceased Harun Farocki: Harun Farocki: Working on the Sight-Lines (Amsterdam University Press, 2004). Prof Elsaesser will give his keynote speech at the ‘World Cinema and the Essay Film’ conference on 2 May about ‘The Essay Film between Festival Favourite and Interactive Installation‘.