VES 72: Sound Cinema

The Director of Undergraduate Studies
acts as the course head for all VES Tutorials:
VES 97r – Sophomore Year
VES 98r – Junior Year
VES 99 – Senior Year (Thesis/Senior Project)
VES 91r – Special Projects

From left: New York Stock Exchange Chairman John Thain, DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. Executive Chairman Roger Enrico, and DreamWorks founders Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, on the bell podium at the NYSE on October 28, 2004, shortly before shares in DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. started trading. The initial public offering raised a more-than-expected $812 million in a deal that marked the first IPO by a major movie studio in seven years. The deal separated the animation group from the live-action unit of DreamWorks, formed a decade ago by Spielberg, Geffen, and Katzenberg. Image: © Bettmann/CORBIS

Connor received his PhD in intellectual history from Johns Hopkins for a dissertation on the interplay between existentialism and social science in postwar American literature. His current projects include “The Studios after the Studios: Hollywood in the Neoclassical Era, 1970–2005,” which tells the corporate histories of contemporary Hollywood through close readings of landmark films; “The Interpretation of DreamWorks;” and “All This Actually Happened: Reality in the Sixties.” His writings on theories of adaptation, avant-garde filmmaker Owen Land, Flight Plan, Braveheart, the Vivendi-Universal merger, and Jean-Paul Sartre have appeared in the Boston Globe, m/c journal, Adaptation, Representations, the Baffler, and MLN. Other recent work and teaching considers the use of systems theory by artists, the history of sound cinema, and E. L. Doctorow. As an undergraduate at Harvard (’92) Connor was a social studies concentrator.