Mark G. Cooper
Associate Professor
English and Film and Media Studies
Office: 212 Humanities Office
(803) 777-2058
coopermg@mailbox.sc.edu

Education
Ph.D., Brown University, 1998

Areas of Specialization
• early cinema
• U.S. cultural history
• feminism
• institutions

Recent Courses
• Introduction to Film and Media Studies
• History of Cinema (I)
• Cinema and the Archives
• Sex, Cinema and the City: 1914-1928

Research
Cooper’s first book, Love Rules: Silent Hollywood and the Rise of the Managerial Class (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), describes how movies helped transform a nineteenth-century America run by rugged industrialists and entrepreneurs into a nation of consumers administered by corporations and bureaucrats. His second book, Universal Women: A Case of Institutional Change (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming), examines the rise and fall of women directors at the Universal Film Manufacturing Co. between 1912 and 1919. He traces step by step the institutional process that first questioned, then insisted upon, the assumption that directing should be a job for men. In addition to these books, essays by Cooper appear in Cultural Critique, Screen, Film Criticism, and the Quarterly Review of Film and Video.