John David Rhodes

John David Rhodes teaches film at the University of Cambridge, where he is Director of the Centre for Film and Screen. His publications include Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome (Minnesota, 2007), Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image (co-edited with Elena Gorfinkel, Minnesota 2011), and Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film (Minnesota, 2017). He is a founding co-editor of the online film and visual theory journal World Picture.

He taught at Sussex from 2006 until 2014. He was a Visiting Fellow in the School of English, while teaching at the University of Cambridge where he was a University Lecturer in Film in the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages (Department of Italian).

John David Rhodes has published widely on European and American cinema and maintains a special interest in Italian cinema. He is interested in putting cinema into conversation with other artistic, cultural, and material forms. The relationship between the cinema and the built environment has been a consistent theme across his work. Most recently he has published Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film. This book proposes a critique of private property and cinema spectatorship through a consideration of particular architectural styles of dwelling and their appearance in cinema. The book was hailed in Critical Inquiry for the way in which it ‘points cinema studies in new directions that should inspire scholarship, teaching, and debate about space, modernity, and Hollywood history’.