Education:
B.A . Brown University, 1963
M.A. Columbia University, 1966
Ph.D. Brown University, 1973
Contact:
Email: jrapf@ou.edu or joanna.e.rapf@dartmouth.edu
Although her advanced degrees are in English romantic poetry, Professor Rapf now teaches exclusively in the areas of film history and theory, with an emphasis on feminist theory and comedy. Her essays have appeared in The Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, The Quarterly Review of Film & Video Studies, Literature/Film Quarterly, Studies in American Humor, and numerous anthologies. Among their subjects are Roscoe Arbuckle, Harry Langdon, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, the early history of MGM, and children of the Hollywood blacklist. Following her retirement from OU in 2016, she accepted an appointment as a Visiting Professor of Film & Media Studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH where she continues to teach.
Women and comic film, silent film comedy, and film history up until 1960. She is working on a book for the University of Mississippi Press about her grandfather, Harry Rapf, who was one of the founders of MGM and an important producer there until his death in 1949.
The Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy (2013)
Interviews with Sidney Lumet (2005)
On the Waterfront: A Cambridge University Press Film Handbook (2003)
Buster Keaton: A Bio-Bibliography (1995)
