Murray Smith (philosopher and film theorist)


Murray Smith is a film theorist and philosopher of art based at the University of Kent, where he is Professor of Film and co-director of the . He is the author of three books and numerous articles on film and aesthetics, and the co-editor of three collections of essays. He was President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image from 2014-17, and has served on the editorial boards of Screen, Cinema Journal, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Projections and . He has held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and a Laurance S Rockefeller Fellowship at Princeton University’s Centre for Human Values. He delivered a Kracauer Lecture in 2014 at the Goethe University Frankfurt, the inaugural Beacon Institute lecture in 2015, and the Beardsley Lecture in 2018, sponsored by Temple University at the Barnes Foundation.

Work

Murray Smith works in cognitive film theory and analytic philosophy of film. In Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema Smith rehabilitated the idea that characters are central to our experience of narrative. His approach to our emotional responses to characters draws on cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Film Theory and Philosophy, which Smith edited with Richard Allen, makes the wider case for an approach to film drawing on the tools of analytic philosophy. In Film, Art, and the Third Culture, Smith elaborates and defends the approach underpinning much of his earlier research, arguing in favour of a naturalized or ‘third cultural’ approach to aesthetics, integrating the knowledge and methods of the humanities and the sciences.

Biography

He attended the Dame Alice Owen’s School in Potters Bar, and studied English Language and Literature at the University of Liverpool. He began his career as a film theorist as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he completed his PhD under the supervision of David Bordwell. He is the younger brother of the literary historian Professor Nigel Smith, and spouse of sociologist Professor Miri Song .

Books