Colin MacCabe

Colin MacCabe
MacCabe in Soho, London (January 2007)
Born	(1949-02-09) 9 February 1949 (age 68)
Nationality	British
Alma mater	Trinity College, Cambridge
Known for	Screen theory

Colin Myles Joseph MacCabe (born 9 February 1949) is a British academic, writer and film producer. He is currently a distinguished professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh.

MacCabe was educated at St Benedict's School, Ealing, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his first degree and doctorate entitled James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (which was subsequently revised and published in 1978). While a graduate student he attended the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (1972–73), following courses by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. In 1974 he was elected a research fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he remained from 1976 until 1981 as a university assistant lecturer in the history of Modern and Early Modern English in relation to literature, and also became a teaching fellow of King's College, Cambridge.

MacCabe became involved in Screen, a journal of film theory published by SEFT (Society for Education in Film and Television) https://academic.oup.com/screen, becoming a member of its board in 1973–78 and contributing essays such as "Realism and Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses" (1974). This was a period that critic Robin Wood described as the "felt moment of Screen" – the time when critical theories emanating from Paris in the late 1960s began to intervene in Anglophone film culture. By releasing the energy and intellectual debate associated with a major paradigm shift, Screen posed a "formidable and sustained challenge to traditional aesthetics" and academia.Screen attempted the ambitious project of linking cinema to other cultural and social frameworks, as part of an investigation of signification and the constitution of human subjectivity in history.

MacCabe came to public prominence in 1981 when he was denied tenure as a consequence of his position at the centre of a much publicised dispute within the faculty of English concerning the teaching of structuralism. His account of events was published three decades later in "A Tale of Two Theories".

After leaving Cambridge he took up a professorship of English at the University of Strathclyde (1981–85) where he was Head of Department and introduced graduate programmes developing it as a centre for literary linguistics. After over a decade, in which he combined his positions at the British Film Institute with a one-semester appointment at the University of Pittsburgh, he took up a fractional professorship at the University of Exeter (1998–2006), and then at Birkbeck, University of London (1992–2006). He is currently visiting Professor of English at University College, London and at the Birkbeck Institute. In 2011 he taught for a semester in the Department of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. He was a visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in the Michaelmas term of 2014. Since 1986 he has remained a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.