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Colin MacCabe
MacCabe in Soho, London (January 2007)
Born	(1949-02-09) 9 February 1949 Essex, England
Education	Trinity College, Cambridge
Occupations	Academic, literary critic, film scholar, author, and film producer
Known for	Work on James Joyce, literary criticism, film studies, and cinema

Colin Myles Joseph MacCabe (born 9 February 1949) is an English academic, literary critic, film scholar, author, and film producer. He is currently a distinguished professor of English and film at the University of Pittsburgh. He has contributed on the Irish novelist James Joyce, including the books “'James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word'' and ''A Very Short Introduction to James Joyce''.  He has also worked with the British Film Institute and the London Consortium.

Early life and education

MacCabe attended St. Benedict's School in Ealing, London, from 1956 to 1966. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1967 to 1971.

From 1971 to 1974, MacCabe was a research student and Senior Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge.

He subsequently became a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from 1974 to 1976. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge in 1976. His doctoral thesis was titled ''James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word: an examination of James Joyce's practice of writing and its consequences for literary criticism''.

Career

Maccabe as a graduate student attended the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (1972–73), following courses by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. In 1974 he was elected a research fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he remained from 1976 until 1981 as a university assistant lecturer in the history of Modern and Early Modern English in relation to literature, and also became a teaching fellow of King's College, Cambridge.

University of Strathclyde

From 1981 to 1985, MacCabe was Professor of English at the University of Strathclyde. His work during this period continued to engage with literary theory and criticism while also expanding into questions concerning language, culture, and popular forms of representation.

British Film Institute

MacCabe joined the British Film Institute (BFI), where he held senior positions in film research and production. He served as Head of Production from 1985 to 1989 and Head of Research from 1989 to 1998.

MacCabe became involved in Screen, a journal of film theory published by SEFT (Society for Education in Film and Television) becoming a member of its board in 1973–78 and contributing essays such as "Realism and Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses" (1974). This was a period that critic Robin Wood described as the "felt moment of Screen" – the time when critical theories emanating from Paris in the late 1960s began to intervene in Anglophone film culture. By releasing the energy and intellectual debate associated with a major paradigm shift, Screen posed a "formidable and sustained challenge to traditional aesthetics" and academia.

MacCabe came to public prominence in 1981 when he was denied tenure as a consequence of his position at the centre of a much publicised dispute within the faculty of English concerning the teaching of structuralism. His account of events was published three decades later in "A Tale of Two Theories".

After leaving Cambridge he took up a professorship of English at the University of Strathclyde (1981–85), where he was Head of Department and introduced graduate programmes, developing it as a centre for literary linguistics. After over a decade, in which he combined his positions at the British Film Institute with a one-semester appointment at the University of Pittsburgh, he took up a fractional professorship at the University of Exeter (1998–2006), and then at Birkbeck, University of London (1992–2006). He is currently visiting Professor of English at University College, London and at the Birkbeck Institute. In 2011 he taught for a semester in the Department of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. He was a visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in the Michaelmas term of 2014. Since 1986 he has remained a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Writing and academic interests

MacCabe has published widely on film and literature with particular emphasis on James Joyce, Jean-Luc Godard, and topics in the history and theory of language. He has served as chairman of the London Consortium, which he co-founded with Mark Cousins, Paul Hirst, and Richard Humphreys. He has edited Critical Quarterly.

Funded by the AHRC, the Colonial Film Project 2007-2010 was co-directed with Lee Grieveson. Following Raymond Williams's pioneering work in the 1980s on a historically founded etymology – Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which began in 2005 will be completed in 2017.

External links

• Colin MacCabe at IMDb.
• MacCabe's homepage from University of Pittsburgh.