Miriam Hansen (28 April 1949 – 5 February 2011) was a film historian who made important contributions to the study of early cinema and mass culture.
[2] According to Daniel Morgan of the University of Chicago, "She was in the first generation of scholars to see film viewing as a historically defined and shaped activity .
And also to understand that that meant we had to look at older films through the lens of the viewers they were intended for.”[1] She saw fans of Rudolph Valentino, for instance, as possibly forming an alternative public sphere to express their desires.
Hansen was also a scholar of the Frankfurt school and a prominent interpreter of the theories of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer on mass culture.
According to fellow University of Chicago professor Tom Gunning, she "provided the best of models for film studies at the moment that it moved from its pioneering focus on Grand Theory to a broader sense of a field that must include archival research, political perspectives, aesthetic awareness and theoretical ambition.