Associate Professor

Graduate Studies in Media Arts
Film & Television Studies

A.B. cum laude History and Literature, Harvard University. M.A. English, high distinction, University of Arizona. Ph.D. English and History, University of Arizona.

Dr. Pettey bridges the critical and creative areas of the School of Media Arts with primary teaching interests in genre theory (film noir, melodrama, the Western), film and television adaptations of fiction, and screenwriting, primarily for television. His research interests concern the intersections of literature, art, visual culture, and film, particularly in the Post War era. His other teaching areas include: 19th and 20th century aesthetic, narrative, and critical theories and their influences upon film and television studies.

He is editor of a collection of new scholarly essays on the Western for Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres (2004). Among the scholars included were John Cawelti, Paul Reddin, Lee Clark Mitchell, John Lenihan, Jennifer Jenkins, Corless Smith, and Fred See. That volume also included an extensive biblio-filmography and interviews with Walon Green, who wrote the screenplay with Sam Peckinpah for The Wild Bunch, and Max Evans, the author of The Rounders and Hi-Lo Country. Edward Buscombe of the British Film Institute praised it as an "essential collection" on the genre.

He has also published articles on Melville and Faulkner. Harold Bloom included his essay on cannibalism and slavery in Moby-Dick for a new volume of Modern Critical Interpretations (2007). His chapter on teaching visual culture and modernism will be included in a collection on Faulkner's As I Lay Dying for the Modern Languages Association (2009).

In 2008, Wendy Apple interviewed him about the history of Post War film editing for the up-coming book to accompany her distinguished documentary The Cutting Edge. He was also interviewed for two articles on contemporary television practices for Conde Nast Portfolio in July of 2008.

His article, "Topographic Economies in Dassin's Thieves' Highway," will appear in the latest issue (2009) of Film Criticism, whose editors described it as "the definitive reading of the movie." His paper on Rumpole of the Bailey will be delivered at the Adaptation Studies Conference for the British Film Institute in London in late September 2009.

For many years, he has assisted with plot concepts and overviews, and provided literary and cultural research for television series, among them Millennium (FOX) and Surface (NBC). He worked as Script Consultant for the ABC six episode mini-series Empire, which aired in the summer of 2005. Empire received critical praise from The New York Times and The New Yorker, among others.

Currently, he is writing essays on film noir.

e-mail: petteyh@email.arizona.edu

Marshall Bldg

ePortfolio: Homer Pettey