Gregory Waller

Biography

Before retiring from IU in 2025, I served as editor of the quarterly journal, Film History for ten years, directed dissertations, directed Cinema and Media Studies in the Media School, and taught a range of courses in American film history.  My publications include Main Street Amusements: Movies and Commercial Entertainment in a Southern City, 1895-1930, which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Award from the Society for Cinema Studies and the Theatre Library Award. In addition to publications on popular American cinema, film exhibition, and moviegoing, my research covers the history of multi-sited and multi-purpose cinema–that is, film screened for different purposes in schools, churches, factories, fairgrounds, and other places beyond the movie theater.  Here are a few examples:

• Beyond the Movie Theater: Sites, Sponsors, Uses, Audiences (U of California Press, 2023)
• “Popular Science Monthly and the Uses of Moving Pictures,” in Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, eds. Charlie Keil and Rob King (Oxford U Press, 2024)
• “Putting Films to Work: System, the Magazine for Business,” in Films that Work II eds. Yvonne Zimmerman, Vinzenz Hediger, Florian Hoof  (Amsterdam U Press, 2024)
• “The American Petroleum Institute: Sponsored Motion Pictures in the Service of Public Relations,” in Petrocinema: Sponsored Film and the Oil Industry, ed. Patrick Vonderau and Marina Dahlquist (Bloomsbury, 2021).
• “International Harvester, Business Screen, and the History of Advertising Film,” in Films That Sell: Moving Pictures and Advertising, ed. Bo Florin, Nico de Klerk, and Patrick Vonderau (Palgrave, 2016)
• “Projecting the Power of 16mm, 1935-1945,” in Useful Cinema eds. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson (Duke U Press, 2011).

My forthcoming publications include:

      Road to Perdition for the U of Texas Press series, 21st Century Film Essentials

     A Century in 16mm: The Remaking of Twentieth-Century Cinema, c0-edited with Haidee Wasson for Oxford U Press