Brendan Kredell

Associate Professor of Film
Office: 534 O’Dowd Hall
Email: [email protected]

Education
BS, Foreign Service – Georgetown University
AM, Humanities (Cinema and Media Studies) – University of Chicago
PhD, Screen Culture – Northwestern University

Areas of Study

• Urban Media Studies
• Reception and Audience Studies
• Film Festivals
• Media Industries

Select Courses

• FLM 1150: Introduction to Film
• FLM 2150: Methods of Cinema Studies
• FLM 2320: Global Cinemas
• FLM 3200: History of Film: The Silent Era
• FLM 3340: Cities and Cinema
• FLM 3650: Essay Filmmaking
• FLM 3900: Film Festivals
• FLM 3905: Hollywood & The Red Scare

Biography

Brendan Kredell is Associate Professor of Film at Oakland University. He has spent his academic career researching the relationship between cities and media, with particular focus on media audiences and patterns of media consumption, cultural policy, urban development, and film festivals. He is the co-editor of two books: Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice (2016), with Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist, and The Routledge Companion to Media and the City (2022), with Erica Stein and Germaine Halegoua. Recent work has explored the use of cultural analytics in the film festival circuit, the re-mediation of Albert Kahn’s architecture in contemporary representations of Detroit, the legacy of Edgar Allan Poe in the BBC’s Luther,  and the geography of film exhibition in contemporary American cities. Currently he is editing a two-volume collection of essays on film festival research.

He co-founded and -edited Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture, and continues to serve on its board. He also regularly advises governmental agencies and arts & culture organizations on issues related to media and policy. Prior to his current academic appointment, Kredell taught at the University of Calgary and served as a Fulbright Fellow at the Cities Center of the University of Toronto. 

Books

The Routledge Companion to Media and the City. Erica Stein, Germaine Halegoua, and Brendan Kredell, eds. London: Routledge, 2022.

Film Festivals: Theory, History, Method, Practice. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, Skadi Loist, eds. London: Routledge, 2016.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters (selected)

“Making ‘Invisible Architecture’ Visible: The Posthumous Re-Mediation of Albert Kahn.” In Cinematic Starchitecture: The Celebrity Status of Urban Structures in Film, eds. Paul Newland and Merrill Schleier. London: Routledge, 2025.

“Independent Film and the US Festival Circuit.” In Shaping Film Festivals in a Changing World: Practice and Methods, eds. Dorota Ostrowska and Tamara Falicov, 251-268. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2025.

“Watching the Detectives: Flânerie and Surveillance in Luther’s London.” In London as Screen Gateway, eds. Elizabeth Evans and Malini Guha, 63-80. London: Routledge, 2023.

“Scarcity, Ubiquity, and the Film Festival After COVID.” In Rethinking Film Festivals in the Pandemic Era, eds. Marijke de Valck and Antoine Damiens. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

“Twenty-First Century Battles and Eighteenth Century Tools: Copyright in the COVID-19 Era.” With Michael Madison. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies: Teaching Media. (vol. 6, no. 2, Spring 2021).

“Copyright Under COVID-19 in Film and Media Studies: An Introduction.” With Kirsten Moana Thompson. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies: Teaching Media. (vol. 6, no. 2, Spring 2021).

“For Whom Are the Movies?: The Landscape of Movie Exhibition in the Gentrified City.” In The City in American Cinema: Post-industrialism, Urban Culture, and Gentrification, eds. Lawrence Webb and Johan Andersson. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.

“Complicated Negotiations: Reception and Audience Studies into the Digital Age.” In The Film Theory Handbook, M. Hunter Vaughan and Tom Conley, eds. New York: Anthem Press, 2018.

“Positionality and Film Festival Research: A Conversation.” with Diane Burgess. In Film Festivals: History, Theory, Method, Practice, eds. Marijke de Valck, Brendan Kredell, and Skadi Loist. London: Routledge, 2016.

“Borderlines: Boundaries and Transgression in the City Films of Martin Scorsese.” In A Companion to Martin Scorsese, ed. Aaron Baker, 331–351. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015.

“Wes Anderson and the City Spaces of Indie Cinema.” New Review of Film and Television Studies (vol. 10, no. 1, March 2012): 83–96.

“T.O. Live With Film: The Toronto International Film Festival and Municipal Cultural Policy in Contemporary Toronto.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies (vol. 21, no.1, Spring 2012): 21–37.