Rate My Professor Chris Robé

Chris Robé is a professor of Film and Media Studies in the School of Communication & Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University, part of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. He earned his PhD in Film and Media Studies/Literature from Lehigh University and joined the faculty in 2007. Robé serves as a faculty fellow in the Peace, Justice and Human Rights Initiative and as a member of the Executive Committee for the Global Studies program. His teaching integrates media production with theoretical and historical analysis to train students in counter-cinema, alternative media practices, and strategies for social change through media.

Robé's research centers on the use of media by communities and social movements as a material practice for collective struggles toward equity, justice, and sustainable systems. Key areas include historical materialism, cultural studies, media activism, community media, U.S. radical film culture of the 1930s, anarchist-based video activism, the relationship between video and digital media activism and state repression in contexts such as animal rights campaigns, counter-summit protests, copwatching, and anti-Muslim surveillance, conservative digital media activism in Florida, street art and graffiti mediating tensions around Brexit, neoliberalism, and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and archival research on Raymond Williams' contributions to film and television studies. His major publications encompass four books: Left of Hollywood: Cinema, Modernism, and the Emergence of U.S. Radical Film Culture (University of Texas Press, 2010), Breaking the Spell: A History of Anarchist Filmmakers, Videotape Guerrillas, and Digital Ninjas (PM Press, 2017), InsUrgent Media from the Front: A Media Activism Reader co-edited with Stephen Charbonneau (Indiana University Press, 2020), and Abolishing Surveillance: Digital Media Activism and State Repression (PM Press, 2023). Peer-reviewed articles include 'Taking Hollywood Back: The Historical Costume Drama, the Biopic, and Popular Front US Film Criticism' in Cinema Journal (2009), 'El Grito de Sunset Park: Cop Watching, Community Organizing, and Video Activism' in JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (2020) with Stephen Charbonneau, 'Reflections on the Inheritances of Indymedia in the Age of Surveillance and Social Media' in Media, Culture & Society (2020) with Todd Wolfson, 'The Specter of Communism: A Communist Structure of Feeling within Romanian New Wave Cinema' in Film Criticism (2017), and contributions to Jump Cut, Journal of Film and Video, and Framework. Robé has presented his work through book tours, podcasts such as Coffee With Comrades, and essays in PopMatters and Public Seminar.