Waugh, Thomas

Thomas Waugh
Professor, Film Studies & Interdisciplinary Studies in Sexuality
Director, Concordia HIV/AIDS Project
Concordia University Research Chair in Documentary Film and in Sexual Representation

• PhD, Columbia University, 1981

Contact
email: thomas.waugh@concordia.ca
telephone: 514-848-2424 ext.4654
location: FB 315-5

Thomas Waugh, born the year of Aag, Boogie-Doodle, Feeling of Hostility, Louisiana Story, Rope, and La Terra Trema, is Concordia Research Chair in Sexual Representation and Documentary. His research publications and teaching on documentary have touched on Quebec direct cinema, Joris Ivens, the National Film Board of Canada, independent work from India, and committed cinema. His interests in sexual representation span queer film and video, pornography and homoeroticism in moving image media as well as photography and graphic art, Canadian and Quebec cinema, and HIV/AIDS. Waugh's books include the anthologies, Show Us Life: Towards a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary (1984) , Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (with Michael Baker and Ezra Winton, 2010), and The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John Greyson (with Brenda Longfellow and Scott MacKenzie, 2013); the collections The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema (2000) and The Right to Play Oneself: Looking back on Documentary Film (2011); the monographs Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from their Beginnings to Stonewall (1996), The Romance of Transgression in Canada: Sexualities, Nations, Moving Images (2006), Montreal Main (2010); and the edited art books Outlines: Underground Gay Graphics From Before Stonewall (2002),  Lust Unearthed: Vintage Gay Graphics from the Dubek Collection. (with Willie Walker, 2004), Gay Art: A Historic Collection (scholarly edition, with Felix Lance Falkon, 2006), and Comin' At Ya! The Homoerotic 3-D Photographs of Denny Denfield. (with David L. Chapman, 2007). Forthcoming is the monograph Joris Ivens: Essays on the Career of a Radical Documentarist,  and his current research interests are an interdisciplinary approach to confessionality. He is also co-editor with Matthew Hays of the series of 19 monographs Queer Film Classics (Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver). He was director of the Concordia Community Lecture Series on HIV/AIDS from 1993 to 2003.

Research Interests: documentary cinema, sexual representation,  queer studies, Canadian cinema, AIDS representation, queer film and video, Joris Ivens, Indian cinema.