Charlie Keil

Charlie Keil is the Principal of Innis College, past Director of the Cinema Studies Institute, and a Professor in the History Department at the University of Toronto. He has published extensively on the topic of early cinema, especially the pivotal ‘transitional era’ of the 1910s, in such books as Early American Cinema in Transition (2001); American Cinema’s Transitional Era (2004, co-edited with Shelley Stamp); American Cinema of the 1910s (2008, co-edited with Ben Singer), Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks and Publics of Early Cinema (2012, co-edited with Marta Braun, Rob King, Paul Moore, and Louis Pelletier), and, most recently, The Companion to D.W. Griffith (2018).

He has also published on other aspects of American cinema, including the relationship between humour and animation, in Funny Pictures: Animation and Comedy in Studio-Era Hollywood (2011, co-edited with Daniel Goldmark), and the related crafts of Editing and Special/Visual Effects (2016, co-edited with Kristen Whissel), a volume in the Behind the Silver Screen series.  His current projects are The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema, co-edited with Rob King, and a study of the origins of Hollywood, as both moviemaking site and cultural concept, in collaboration with Denise McKenna.