Barry Keith Grant


Barry Keith Grant is a Canadian-American critic, educator, editor, and public intellectual best known for his work on genre and popular cinema, especially science fiction and horror, and on various aspects of popular culture, most notably popular music. He is also known for his work on documentary film and is recognized as one of the leading experts on the work of American documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman. An Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Grant has authored or edited more than two dozen books on these subjects, several of which have become standard course texts and widely influential in the field of film studies. He has also been a featured critic on CBC radio.

Career

Grant earned his Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo in American literature and film studies in 1975. From 1975-2016 he taught at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, where he helped develop the undergraduate program in film studies, one of the first in Canada, as well as the country's only graduate program in popular culture. He served as the founding director of that program from 2002-2004 and before that as the founding chair of the interdisciplinary Department of Fine Arts in the 1980s.
Since 1995 Grant has served as editor of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media series for Wayne State University Press, which also includes the innovative "TV Milestones" series. Grant is also the editor of the New Approaches to Film and Media series, originally with Cambridge University Press and now published by Wiley-Blackwell. He has or is currently serving on the editorial boards or advisory editorial boards of several journals including Cinema Journal, Literature/Film Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Science Fiction Studies, and Science Fiction Film and Television. Grant was Editor-in-Chief of the 4-volume Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film, an award-winning reference work involving contributions from 100 scholars around the world.
Grant is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Distinguished Academic Award from the Canadian Association of University Teachers in 2010 and the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Pedagogy Award in 2009. He was the first Canadian film studies scholar to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2010.

Books