Rate My Professor Brian Price

Brian Price is Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto Mississauga, holding an undergraduate appointment there and a graduate appointment in the Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto St. George campus. He earned his PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2003, an MA in Cinema Studies from the same institution in 1996, and a BA in English from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1994. Price's research centers on the philosophy of moving image media, examining the aesthetic dimensions of moral and political philosophy through avant-garde and popular cinema. His work addresses mediation, regret, shame, norm contingency, value, wonder, and the aesthetic aspects of political will unbound by first principles or external judgments. He has served as Associate Director of Graduate Studies in the Cinema Studies Institute from 2022 to 2024 and as Graduate Coordinator from 2017 to 2020.

Price authored the monographs A Theory of Regret (Duke University Press, 2017) and Neither God Nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 2011). He co-edited On Michael Haneke (Wayne State University Press, 2010) with John David Rhodes and Color, the Film Reader (Routledge, 2006) with Angela Dalle Vacche. Selected essays include “The Displacement Project” in Discourse (2016), “Eternally Early” in New Silent Cinema (2015), “The Steady Unsteadiness of Theory” in New Review of Film and Television Studies (2014), “Aesthetic Inequality and Political Seriousness” in World Picture (2014), and “Color, Melodrama, and the Problem of Interiority” in A Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder (2012). Price is a founding co-editor of the journal World Picture, alongside John David Rhodes and Meghan Sutherland, and editor of the book series Superimpositions: Philosophy and the Moving Image for Northwestern University Press. He is completing a book entitled Assayas and Political Seriousness on French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. His teaching encompasses undergraduate courses such as The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, The Films of Martin Scorsese, Global Auteurs, Film Noir and the Problem of Style, and Colour, and graduate seminars including Adorno and Media Theory, Contemporary Political Philosophy and the Moving Image, The Image of Equality: Jacques Rancière’s Film Philosophy, and Cinema and Moral Perfectionism: Stanley Cavell.