We are delighted to announce that Professor James Tweedie is the recipient of the Robert Jolin Osborne Professorship in Cinema and Media Studies. The endowed professorship was established with a $500,000 gift from the Robert Jolin Osborne Trust in memory of UW alum, film historian, and television host, Robert Osborne (1932-2017).
Professor Tweedie is the author of Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Film, New Media, and the Late Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2018) and The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (Oxford UP, 2013), which won the Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award from the Society for Cinema & Media Studies. He has been awarded a Andrew W. Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Film, Video, and New Media Studies and named an Academy Film Scholars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in support of his research on Hollywood studios with particular attention to production design.
The Robert Jolin Osborne Professorship allows the department to recruit, retain, and reward distinguished faculty who have demonstrated excellence in teaching and research in the field of Cinema and Media Studies.
Osborne, a Washington State native, graduated from UW in 1954 with a degree in journalism. He went on to become a Hollywood actor (with Desilu Studios), a film journalist (with a daily column in The Hollywood Reporter), the official biographer of “Oscar” (with a series of published books on the Academy Awards), and a highly successful television presenter, best known for his role as primetime host of Turner Classic Movies (TCM).
In a tribute at the time of his death, TCM wrote: “Robert was embraced by devoted fans who saw him as a trusted expert and friend. His calming presence, gentlemanly style, encyclopedic knowledge of film history, fervent support for film preservation, and highly personal interviewing style all combined to make him a world-class host.”
