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December 18, 1946 – March 12, 2025

The Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado-Boulder joins in the tributes of students and scholars around the nation to our colleague and friend Professor Linda Williams. Born in San Francisco on 18 December 1946, Williams earned her BA in Comparative Literature at the University of California-Berkeley in 1969 and made her way to Boulder for her graduate studies. At CU-Boulder she completed her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature — the first Cinema Studies Ph.D. at this institution— with a dissertation on the works of the original enfant terrible of the cinema, Luis Buñuel. This became her first groundbreaking book, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (California, 1981) and gave birth to her stellar career. She continued her career at the University of Illinois-Chicago and the University of California-Irvine, before returning to her Alma mater and becoming an anchor of UC-Berkeley’s Department of Rhetoric and Film Studies Program (now Film & Media Studies).

Along the way Linda Williams became one of the intellectual architects of Feminist Film Theory (before such a branch of scholarship even had a name), blazing trails in areas such as genre studies, melodrama, affect, and spectator ship. Her early works on “body genres” (horror, melodrama, pornography) led to her almost single-handedly inventing the discipline of pornography studies. Her groundbreaking book Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible (California, 1989) became a foundational text and a turning point in film scholarship, making of us all take a second look and take marginal genres seriously. Her scholarship continued to be wide, varied, and as intellectually rigorous whether researching and writing on race (Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson; Princeton 2002), further thoughts on pornography (Screening Sex; Duke 2008) and even serial television (On The Wire; Duke 2014).

Her Colorado connections she kept strong, with a visiting professorship at ��ɫ��Ƶ’s former Film Studies Program (now the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts) in 2013, leading years of student curriculum at the Telluride Film Festival, and enjoying time with Colorado friends from her CU years. Linda Williams was a trailblazer, an example to all of us, and a dear member of the original —and the extended— ��ɫ��Ƶ Cinema Studies family. Linda Williams passed away on 12 March 2025.

See tributes below: