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Richard Allen is Chair Professor of Film and Media Art, and former Dean of the School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. Previously, he served as Professor of Cinema Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where he chaired the Department for a total of 10 years.
Richard Allen’s research interests as a scholar began in the areas of film theory and the philosophy of film. His first book, Projecting Illusion (Cambridge University Press, 1997), articulated a sophisticated version of the illusion theory of representation as a basis for defending a psychoanalytic conception of spectatorship. In addition, he edited, with Murray Smith, the first anthology of analytic film theory, in the philosophical sense of “analytic,” entitled Film Theory and Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1999). Without relinquishing a belief in the value of conceptual clarity within humanistic inquiry, his work has moved towards a revised conception of theory that is manifest in Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (Routledge, 2002), co-edited with Malcolm Turvey.
Allen’s subsequent research in film has focused mostly upon film poetics and aesthetics. He is internationally renowned as a scholar of Alfred Hitchcock. He organized the Hitchcock Centennial Conference in 1999 that co-incided with the publication of Hitchcock: Centennial Essays (BFI, 1999), and he has edited two other anthologies on Hitchcock. In addition to writing 15 scholarly articles on the master of suspense, he is the author of Hitchcock’s Romantic Irony (Columbia University Press, 2007) that examines the relationship between sexuality and style in Hitchcock’s work. From 2001-2018 he edited, with Sid Gottlieb, the Hitchcock Annual (Columbia University Press).
Allen has also worked extensively on Hindi cinema, commonly known as Bollywood. Together with Ira Bhaskar (Jawarharlal Nehru University) he organized a film festival in Abu Dhabi and New York—Muslim Cultures of Bombay Cinema—authored Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema (Tulika, 2009), and edited Bombay Cinema’s Islamicate Histories (Intellect and Orient Blackswan, 2022), which was nominated for the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award 2023. His book Storytelling in Hindi Cinema: Doubles, Deception, and Discovery is contracted with Bloomsbury Press and due out next year (2025).
Growing out of his past work on the philosophy of film, Hitchcock, and Indian Cinema, Allen’s newest research focuses on relationship between affective piety, melodrama, and film both from a historical and transnational perspective. He has published on affective piety and melodrama in the western tradition and on religion and melodrama in Hitchcock, as well as on the role of religion in Hindi cinema. His most recent article is entitled “Towards a Philosophy of Melodrama.”
Since joining the School of Creative Media in 2016, Allen has developed research at the intersection of art and new media. He organized two international conferences on Machine Learning and Art, Art Machines (2019) and Art Machines 2 (2021), and, with Jeffrey Shaw he curated a major exhibition on computational art called Art Machines at the Indra and Harry Banga Gallery, CityUHK. He published the accompanying book length catalogue, Art Machines (2020), with CityU Press. He also has a forthcoming publication on new media art and writings of Jeffrey Shaw.
In his capacity as Director for the Center of Applied Computing and Interactive Media, he is involved in fostering several, major, grant funded research collaborations with Jeffrey Shaw: City in Time, a 360, immersive, urban cultural heritage app in Hong Kong; Future Cinema Systems, a next generation immersive media environment; and the Hong Kong Martial Arts Living Archive (also in collaboration with Hing Chao).
Representative recent publications:
