Murray Pomerance

Murray Pomerance is a Canadian film scholar, author, and professor teaching in the Department of Sociology at Ryerson University and in the Joint Program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University and York University. He was born in 1946 in Hamilton, Ontario and studied at the University of Toronto, the University of Michigan (with Kenneth Boulding and Theodore Newcomb), the New School for Social Research (with Benjamin Nelson), the State University of New York at Buffalo (with Edgar Z. Friedenberg and Warren Bennis), and York University.

Pomerance has written extensively on film, cinematic experience, and performance, and has also edited and co-edited more than a dozen anthologies exploring cinema. In addition, Pomerance is editor of the “Techniques of the Moving Image” series at Rutgers University Press and the “Horizons of Cinema” series at State University of New York Press and, with Lester D. Friedman and Adrienne L. McLean respectively, co-editor of both the “Screen Decades” and “Star Decades” series at Rutgers University Press. He is on the editorial board of Rodopi’s Contemporary Cinema series, the THYMOS: Journal of Boyhood Studies, and In Short: The Journal of Small Screen Studies. His book Johnny Depp Starts Here has been translated into the French as Ici Commence Johnny Depp (tr. Pauline Soulat; Éditions Capricci 2010), and into the German as Johnny Depp: Betrachtungen zu einem Schauspieler (tr. Andrea Rennschmid; Reinhard Weber Verlag 2006).

Pomerance also writes fiction, and is a 1992 O. Henry Award winner. His work has appeared in New Directions, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Boston Review, Chelsea, Confrontation, and Descant. He is the author, as well, of Ludwig Bemelmans: A Bibliography (Heineman, 1993).

In 1995, Pomerance founded the Media Studies Working Group with John Sakeris at Ryerson University. The group hosted three international conferences from 1996 to 2000, which ultimately resulted in three books: Pictures of a Generation on Hold: Selected Papers (Media Studies Working Group 1996), Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot! Essays on Guns and Popular Culture (Pearson Education 1999), and Closely Watched Brains (Pearson Education 2001). The group also published Mustafa Koc and Roderick John MacRae’s Working Together: Civil Society Working for Food Security in Canada (2001).

Pomerance has also been involved in film production, appearing in Brandon Cronenberg’s Broken Tulips (2008), and acting, writing, and composing for R. Bruce Elder’s Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World (1985). In the summer of 2009, he appeared on Broadway in conjunction with a performance of The 39 Steps.