Raymond Watkins, Ph.D.

Professional Bio

Raymond Watkins specializes in rhetorical studies, film studies, and comparative literature. Before coming to Penn State, he served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University (2006-2010), Oberlin College (2008-2009) and Colgate University (2010-2014). His research interests include visual rhetoric, the interarts, the European avant-garde, film and visual culture, and twentieth-century European culture. His book, Late Bresson and the Visual Arts: Cinema, Painting and Avant-Garde Experiment (University of Amsterdam Press, 2018), uses the framework of media archaeology to examine the neglected color films of the French filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901-1999). The study examines the way Bresson's films draw on the history of painterly style from Georges de la Tour to the present, on such post-war abstract painterly styles as L'art informel and Le nouveau réalisme, and on inter-war avant-garde practices in Russian constructivism, French surrealism, and American minimalism. He recently completed an article on the films of the Taiwanese filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, and is at work on a second book project entitled After the New Wave: The French Second Generation 1968-1982, which focuses on a generation of French filmmakers who grew up in the shadow of the Nouvelle Vague, and whose films have largely been ignored or forgotten, especially in North America, including Philippe Garrel, Jean Eustache, Marguerite Duras, and Chantal Akerman.