Richard Abel earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California . After many years of teaching in the English Department at Drake University (where he also directed an undergraduate Cultural Studies program as well as the Center for the Humanities), he came to the University of Michigan in 2002 as the Robert Altman Collegiate Professor of Film Studies. Currently, he directs the Graduate Program in Screen Arts & Cultures.

Abel's essays have appeared in dozens of journals (including Cinema Journal , Screen , Film Quarterly , Sight & Sound , Film History , and Studies in French Cinema ) and been translated into French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Dutch. His books include French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929 (Princeton 1984); French Film Theory and Criticism, 1907-1939: A History/Anthology , in two volumes (Princeton 1988); The Ciné Goes to Town: French Cinema, 1896-1914 ( California 1994); Silent Film (Rutgers 1996); and The Red Rooster Scare: Making Cinema American, 1900-1910 ( California 1999). Recently, with Rick Altman, he edited The Sounds of Early Cinema (Indiana 2001). He also has edited the Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (forthcoming from Routledge) and recently completed Imagining Community in US Cinema, 1910-1914 (forthcoming from California ). His next project is a study of the "courtship and marriage" of two ephemeral discourses in the USA : newspapers and moving pictures, 1911-1915.

Abel's most recent courses include: Seminar in Film Historiography, French Cinema: From the First Wave to the New Wave, The Emergence of Mass Culture: From Dime Novels to Nickel Dumps, The Vietnam/Persian Gulf Wars on Film/Video, and Film Theory and Criticism.