Thomas Leitch has been appointed Unidel Andrew B. Kirkpatrick
Jr. Chair in Writing in the Department of English, effective Sept. 1.
Also newly appointed in the College of Arts and Sciences is
Meredith K. Ray, professor of Italian and interim chair of the Department of
Languages, Literatures and Cultures, who has been named Elias Ahuja Professor
of Foreign Languages and Literatures.
Leitch is a professor in the Department of English who
trained as a literary scholar at Columbia and Yale, moving into cinema studies
when he discovered a love of storytelling that transcended literature and
leading to his first book, What Stories Are:
Narrative Theory and Interpretation.
He teaches film studies and literature at UD and has taught
undergraduate courses in film, specializing in popular Hollywood genres from
romantic comedy to film noir, and graduate courses in literary and cultural
theory. He is the author of nine books, the editor of two others and is
currently editing a collection of essays, The
Scandal of Adaptation.
Leitch has also written more than 100 essays, publishing
extensively on narrative theory, genre theory and popular culture.
His books include Perry Mason
and Crime Films, which was
nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2003, and books about Alfred
Hitchcock. Over the past 10 years, most of his work—especially Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From “Gone with
the Wind” to “The Passion of the Christ”—has focused on the process of
textual adaptation and its broader implications for the teaching of English.
His most recent
books are The History
of American Literature on Film (2019),
the Oxford Handbook of
Adaptation Studies (2017) and Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority,
and Liberal Education in the Digital Age
(2014).
A two-time alumnus
of the Salzburg Seminar, Leitch has taught as a Fulbright Lecturer at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He serves on the steering committee of the
Delaware Teachers Institute and on the editorial boards of Literature/Film Quarterly, Adaptation, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Hitchcock
Annual, Studia Filmoznawcze, the
Contemporary Film and Media Studies series published by Wayne State University
Press, and the Adaptation and Visual Culture series published by Palgrave
Macmillan. He regularly reviews mystery and suspense fiction for Kirkus Reviews, where he is mystery editor.
Article
by College of Arts and Sciences communications staff
Published July 16, 2021
