Steven Cohan
Steven Cohan
Dean's Distinguished Professor Emeritus
CONTACT
English
429 Hall of Languages
Email: smcohan@syr.edu
A&S AFFILIATIONS
Women's and Gender Studies
Professor Emeritus Steven Cohan taught courses and supervised graduate research in film studies, popular culture, gender and sexualities, and cultural studies. His books include Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative (1988, co-authored with Linda M. Shires), Screening the Male (1993, co-edited with Ina Rae Hark), The Road Movie Book (1997, co-edited with Ina Rae Hark), Masked Men: Masculinity and the Movies in the Fifties(1997), Hollywood Musicals, The Film Reader (2001), Incongruous Entertainment: Camp, Cultural Value, and the MGM Musical (2005), CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2008) The Sound of Musicals (2010), Hollywood by Hollywood (2018), and Routledge Film Guidebooks: Hollywood Musicals (2019). Recent books include monographs on Sunset Boulevard (2022) and Some Like It Hot (2025) for the BFI Film Classics series and On Audrey Hepburn: An Opinionated Guide. His essays have appeared in Camera Obscura,Screen, and Cinema Journal as well as many anthologies. Since retiring he has written essays on Danny Kaye’s queer persona, The Boys in the Band, Billy Wilder’s apartment plots, Marilyn Monroe biopics, the cold war cycle of musicals set in Paris, Bob Hope’s comedian musicals, Judy Garland as a cult star, Esther Williams’s Latin lovers, Queer Hollywood Musicals of the 1940s, the 1937 A Star Is Born, Fosse/Verdon, and Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. At present he is starting a new book that examines the connections between film noir and the woman’s film of the 1940s and 1950s. His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Chinese, and Korean. He was awarded the Chancellor's Citation for Exceptional Academic Achievement in 2006 and the Graduate School's Award for Excellence in Graduate Education in 2014. He was President of the Society for Cinema and media Studies from 2015-2017.
Hollywood cinema, Popular Culture, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Reception Studies, and Film & Narrative Theory.
Graduate
ENG 630 Film Melodrama
ENG 730 Film Noir
ENG 730 The Studio System
Undergraduate
ETS 145 Reading Popular Culture
ETS 360 Sexual Politics of Film Noir
ETS 364 Self-Reflexive Hollywood
ETS 360 Cinema and Sexual Difference
ETS 340 The Hollywood Musical