Hansen, Miriam

Miriam Hansen was born in Offenbach, Germany in 1949, the daughter of Jewish parents who survived World War II in exile. She attended J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany as an undergraduate and graduate student. During this time, she studied with Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno. Her primary fields were in English and American Literature with a secondary specialization in Philosophy and History. In 1975, Hansen was awarded a PhD on a dissertation on Ezra Pound's early poetics and cultural criticism. In 1976, she passed the Staatsexmen (a graduate degree administered by the German state).

From 1977-1979, Hansen was at Yale on an ACLS fellowship for German Americanists. During this time, she published her dissertation on Ezra Pound and renewed her academic study of film. From 1979-1982, Hansen taught at Yale in various departments and programs. As coordinator for Film Studies at Yale, she helped develop an undergraduate program in film.

From 1982-1989, Hansen taught at Rutgers University. In 1984, she was awarded a University Fellowship. During the 1985-86 academic year, Hansen held an Andrew Mellon Fellowship at Harvard University. In 1988 she was awarded a Trustees Research Fellowship and in 1988 she was award tenure in the Department of English.

During this time, she was working on her most substantial work. Published in 1991 by Harvard University Press, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film is a landmark study of early cinema that analyzes D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and the silent cinema star Rudolph Valentino through the concept of spectatorship.

In 1988-1989, Hansen received an Alexander von Humbolt Foundation fellowship and spent a year in Germany, researching at the universities of Frankfurt and Konstanz and the German Literature Archive, Marbach am Neckar. In 1990 Hansen joined the University of Chicago as full professor in the Department of English and, in 1991, she married University of Chicago historian Michael Geyer.

At the University of Chicago, Hansen helped found both the Film Studies Center and the Cinema and Media Studies Department. The Film Studies Center, a teaching and research facility for film scholars, was established by Hansen and she became its first director in 1991. In 1995, she founded the Cinema and Media Studies Department that established an undergraduate concentration and a graduate degree granting program. Hansen was active in university service at the University of Chicago, serving on hiring and search committees, the Board of Publications and the Council of the Senate. Outside of the University of Chicago, Hansen was the co-editor of the New German Critique.

Hansen was the recipient of many accolades during her career at the University of Chicago. In 1993, she was appointed the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Division of the Humanities and in 1995 was named the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities. Hansen won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Essay Prize in Film, TV & Video Studies three times, was a 1997-1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2007-2008 fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin.

Miriam Hansen died on February 5, 2011 after a long battle with cancer.