Walter Metz

Chair of CP, Associate Professor

SIUC Faculty Since 2009

Contact Information

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Room: 1107 Communications Bldg.

Office Phone: (618) 453-5087

Fax: 354-2264

Curriculum Vitae:  Download Walter Metz's CV

SIUC Directory: Walter Carl Metz

Education

Ph.D. at University of Texas, Austin, 1996

Biography

Walter Metz is, as of July 1, 2009, the new Chair of the Department of Cinema and Photography. He comes to SIU from Montana State University in Bozeman, where he was the Interim Head of the School of Film and Photography for the past three years. He is an Associate Professor of Film Studies who teaches film, television, theatre, and photography history, theory and criticism. His course for Fall 2009 at SIU is CP 470: "Theatre Goes to the Movies," an intertextual analysis of canonical drama and its relationship to contemporary film and television production. For Spring 2010, he will be teaching CP 470: "Film Production Theory," an attempt to reconcile the seeming disparity between the academic study of film and the learning of film production techniques.

As a researcher, Walter is interested in the relationship between popular media forms, such as the television sitcom and the Hollywood blockbuster film, and high, canonical literature. He has just finished two book chapters, one about the film versions of Ira Levin’s popular novel, The Stepford Wives, and another about the literature on which Alfred Hitchcock's televisions shows were based. His current writing projects include a book-length study of the 1960s telefilm sitcom, Gilligan's Island, and an article applying post-humanist theory to Pixar’s animated film, Wall-e.