Colin MacCabe - Biography
Colin MacCabe is Distinguished Professor of English and Film at the University of Pittsburgh where he has taught since 1985 and Professor of English and Humanities at Birkbeck College , University of London , a post he took up in October 2006. He has edited Critical Quarterly since 1987.
He studied philosophy and English at Trinity College (1967-74) and the Ecole Normale Superieure, rue d'Ulm Paris (l972-73). In his final year as an undergraduate he edited Granta and, with Stephen Heath and Christopher Prendergast, produced Signs of the Times: Introductory Readings in Textual Semiotics. He was elected to a Research Fellowship at Emmanuel College Cambridge in 1974. For the next two years he divided his time between Emmanuel where he researched and taught Renaissance Literature and London where he was an editor of Screen magazine and contributed to the development of what became known as Screen theory.
In 1976 he was appointed to an Assistant Lectureship in the English Faculty at Cambridge on the basis of his doctoral thesis James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word . The lectureship was in the history of the English language in relationship to literature from 1500 to the present day He was elected a Fellow of King's College at the same time.
In l981, after the "MacCabe affair", he became, at 31, the youngest Professor of English in the country at Strathclyde University . He was Head of Department in the period l982-1984 and established undergraduate degrees in film and television (1982) and postgraduate degrees in literary linguistics (1983). He also founded in 1983 the John Logie Baird Centre for Research into Film and Television.
In 1985 he left British academic life to combine a career as a film and television producer for the British Film Institute and Minerva Pictures with a one-semester appointment at the University of Pittsburgh where he had been Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English through the calendar year of l985. Films he produced won prizes at Berlin in l986 Caravaggio (dir. Derek Jarman) San Sebastian in l987 On the Black Hill (dir. Andrew Grieve) and in l988 and l991 at Cannes Distant Voices/Still Lives (dir. Terence Davies) and Young Soul Rebels (dir. Isaac Julien).
In the early nineties MacCabe produced the 16 part Century of Cinema series which included films by Stephen Frears Martin Scorsese, Nagisa Oshima, Anne Marie Mieville and Jean-Luc Godard, amongst others. From l995 to 2002 MacCabe was producer for a series of prize-winning documentaries on the history of the cinema for the Independent Film Channel including The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera ( dir. Adam Simon) and Bad…..assss Cinema (dir. Isaac Julien).
In 1989 after four years as Head of Production MacCabe became Head of Research and Education at the British Film Institute. He established an M.A. Programme with Birkbeck College in 1992 and in 1995 the London Consortium, a graduate programme in the Humanities and Cultural Studies of London of which he was the founding Chair. The Consortium was a partnership between the British Film Institute, Tate, the Architectural Association and Birkbeck College , University of London.
In l998 the recently elected New Labour appointed Alan Parker as Chair of the British Film Institute. Parker sacked MacCabe and the BFI withdrew from the London Consortium where its place was taken by the Institute of Contemporary Arts . MacCabe then joined the University of Exeter as a part-time Professor of English and, in London , established, with Paula Jalfon, Minerva Pictures . In that year he also published Performance (BFI). Since 2001 he has increased his academic commitments, teaching in the Fall term on the Pitt in London programme. From 2002 he began to run down his producing commitments. In 2002 he published a second edition of James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (Palgrave) and in 2003 Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70 (Farrar Strauss Giroux). This year he will publish short books on T.S. Eliot for the British Council and The Butcher Boy for the Irish Film Institute. He is currently writing a book entitled Clint Eastwood: American Artist and, with Ashley Tauchert, a history of English Literature from Shakespeare to the present. He continues to produce for Chris Marker, most recently Owls at Noon: Prelude The Hollow Men (MOMA2005) and for Isaac Julien whose Derek Jarman will be released in 2007.
In October 2006 he resigned his post at Exeter University and took up a similar part-time appointment at Birkbeck, University of London . Exeter has since appointed him to an Honorary Professorship. He was also named Associate Director of the London Consortium from which he had stepped down as Chair the preceding year. He is a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the European Film Academy and a Fellow of the London Consortium.
