Ramona Curry

Through her retirement from university teaching at the end of 2018, Ramona Curry designed and delivered courses on the histories, theories, and strategies for writing about cinema and other forms of popular media and culture. histories, theories, and strategies for writing about cinema and other forms of popular media and culture.  Her ongoing research focuses on the sociocultural impact of media institutions, including film stars and cinema distribution and exhibition historically. She has written extensively about German and more recently about Hong Kong cinema of the mid-20th century. She is author of Too Much of a Good Thing: Mae West as Cultural Icon  (U of Minnesota P, 1996) and numerous essays that have appeared in U.S. and international anthologies and journals, including Cinema Journal, The Journal of Women’s History, Journal of Film and Video, and Camera Obscura. 

Prof. Curry taught at Hong Kong Baptist University as the recipient of a 2004 Fulbright Award and spent Spring 2015 as the "Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Studies" at Uppsala University in Sweden. She is currently completing a monograph entitled Trading in Cultural Spaces: How Chinese Film Came to America, which takes an urban cultural geographic and historiographic approach to rewriting American cinema history “from the margins.”  The archive-research-intensive project has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (2008, 2011) and the University of Illinois Mid-Career Faculty Release Time Award (2014).