Richard Dyer

Richard Dyer (born 1945) is an English academic currently holding a professorship in the Department of Film Studies at King's College London. Specializing in cinema (particularly Italian cinema), queer theory, and the relationship between entertainment and representations of race, sexuality, and gender, he was previously a faculty member of the Film Studies Department at the University of Warwick for many years and has held a number of visiting professorships in the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany.

Born in Leeds to a lower-middle class Conservative Party supporting family and raised in the suburbs of London during the 1940s and 1950s, Dyer studied French (as well as English, German, and Philosophy) at the University of St Andrew's. He then went on to earn his doctoral degree in English at the University of Birmingham’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. During the 1970s, Dyer authored articles for the Gay Left and then during the 1980s wrote for Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of the "Eurocommunist" or Gramscian-wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain. These writings were mostly cultural criticism rather than class politics based, with titles such as In Defence of Disco (1979) and Diana Ross (1982).

Before coming to King's College London in 2006, he was a Professor of Film Studies at the University of Warwick and a visiting professor at the following institutions: University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communications in 1985; the Istituto Universitario Orientale in 1987; Stockholm University in 1996, 2006, and 2010; the University of Copenhagen in 2002; New York University in 2003; the University of Bergamo in 2004; Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar in 2009; the University of St. Andrews in 2011. Throughout his career, he has taught courses on race and ethnicity, film, Stardom, Hollywood, Italian cinema, Federico Fellini, and representation. He is also very involved in graduate education, and has supervised dissertations on subjects ranging from the history of gay cinema during the 1970s to experimental animation. Having already published widely on whiteness, film, and lesbian and gay cultures, Dyer recently published journal articles and book chapters on song in Italian cinema and whiteness in the film, Dirty Dancing.

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