Eric Schaefer is a film and media historian who specializes in exploitation film and other marginalized cinemas. He is the author of the award-winning "Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (Duke University Press), in multiple printings. His edited collection, Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution, was recently published by Duke.

Dr. Schaefer's essays have been published in Cinema Journal, Film QuarterlyThe Moving Image and other journals, and anthologies including Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method (Duke UP), Sleaze Artists: Cinema at the Margins of Taste, Style, and Politics (Duke UP), American Cinema of the 1960s: Themes and Variations (Rutgers UP), The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film (Blackwell) and Learning With the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States (Oxford UP). His most recent essays appear, or are forthcoming, in The Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Film History, and Porn Studies. He is working on Massacre of Pleasure: A History of Sexploitation Films, 1960–1979 and a collection of interviews with "adults only" filmmakers.

Dr. Schaefer has twice served on the Board of Directors of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) and is a recipient of the SCMS Service Award.  He is a Collections Advisor for the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, has served on the Board of Advisors of Northeast Historic Film for many years, and has been on the editorial board of The Moving Image, the journal of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), since its inception in 2001. He founded SCMS's Adult Film History Scholarly Interest Group in 2014.

About

Education

B.A., Webster University
M.A., University of Texas, Austin
Ph.D., University of Texas, Austin

Areas of Expertise

  • Film
  • Media Studies
  • TV

Publications

Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!": A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959

1999

Sex Scene: Media and the Sexual Revolution

2014