Charles Sapp Centennial Professor
Executive Director, UTLA (Los Angeles) and UTNY (New York City)
Noah Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film. The former Chair of RTF (2019-2023), he currently serves as Executive Director of the university’s two study-away centers UTLA (Los Angeles) and UTNY (New York City), where he is based. He is the author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W. W. Norton, 2017), named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review and selected as a Best Summer Book of 2017 by the Financial Times and a Best Film Book of 2017 by the Scotland Herald. In the meantime, British (Faber & Faber), Hungarian (Európa), Russian (Dedinsky), and Iranian (Ashtian) editions have been published.
His other books include: Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins (California, 2014), which the New York Times hailed as “a page turner of a biography” and Huffington Post selected for its Best Film Books of 2014; Detour (British Film Institute, 2008), a book-length study of Ulmer’s acclaimed low-budget film noir; and, as editor, Weimar Cinema: An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era (Columbia, 2009), which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. His introduction to Vicki Baum’s bestselling novel of 1929, Grand Hotel, appeared with the book’s reissue by the New York Review of Books Classics in 2016. His anthology, Billy Wilder on Assignment: Dispatches from Weimar Berlin and Interwar Vienna (trans. Shelley Frisch), which he edited and introduced, appeared from Princeton University Press in 2021. It was selected by Tom Stoppard as a 2021 Book of the Year for the Times Literary Supplement and was longlisted for the 2022 Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book Award. Meanwhile, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian (Portuguese-language), and Chinese editions have appeared.
His latest book, Runnin’ Wild: The Madcap Story of ‘Some Like It Hot’, is due out in summer 2027 from W. W. Norton (Faber & Faber in the UK). A 2026 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow, he is currently completing a short interpretive biography of Billy Wilder for the Yale Jewish Lives series. In previous years, he has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Commission, the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In spring 2022, he was a faculty research fellow at the Harry Ransom Center. He serves as a member of the editorial boards of Film Quarterly, the New Review of Film and Television Studies, and the Germanic Review; he co-edited a special issue of New German Critique in 2020 and is a member the advisory board of the joint Bloomsbury/BFI Screen Studies series. A standing fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities, he was a recipient of the inaugural 2015-2016 NEH Public Scholar research award. In spring 2022, with the support of the Warren Skaaren Film Research Endowment, he served as a faculty fellow at the Harry Ransom Center.
His writing has appeared in The Nation, the New York Review of Books Daily, Boston Globe, New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, The American Scholar, Bookforum, Chronicle of Higher Education, The Paris Review Daily, The Daily Beast, Salon, the Times Literary Supplement, Wall Street Journal, Film Quarterly, Film Comment, Cinema Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Criterion Collection, Brooklyn Rail, Moving Image Source, Vertigo, New German Critique, Raritan, Lingua Franca, Dissent, Salmagundi, Partisan Review, and The Threepenny Review. It has also appeared, in other outlets across the globe, in Greek, Spanish, German, Russian, Hungarian, Portuguese, Italian, and Chinese translation.
From 1995-2004, he taught German and Film Studies at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, CT; from 2004-2019, he taught as Professor of Culture and Media and the founding Director of Screen Studies at the New School in New York City; and he has been a Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. A proud graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. in European History, 1989), he holds advanced degrees from the University of Washington (M.A. in German Literature, 1991) and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D. in German Studies, 1995), graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Fluent in German and conversant in Swedish, he has spent several extended stints—studying, teaching, writing—in Berlin, Vienna, Munich and Sto
Ph.D., German Studies, University of California at Berkeley, 1995
M.A., German Literature, University of Washington, 1991
B.A., European History, University of Pennsylvania, 1989