Adam Lowenstein works on issues relating to the cinema as a mode of historical, cultural, and aesthetic confrontation. His teaching and research link these issues to the relays between genre films and art films, cinema and digital media, the politics of spectatorship, and the construction of national cinemas (with particular attention to American, Australian, British, Canadian, French, Israeli, Italian, and Japanese cases). His areas of interest range across surrealism, trauma studies, Jewish studies, and Frankfurt School film and cultural theory.
Adam is especially invested in horror studies, and is the Founding Director of Pitt’s Horror Studies Center (https://www.as.pitt.edu/horror-studies-center). He serves on the Board of Directors for the George A. Romero Foundation (https://georgearomerofoundation.org) and played a central role in the acquisition of the George A. Romero Collection for Pitt’s constantly growing Horror Studies Archive (https://romero.library.pitt.edu). He is also currently at work as one of the editors (along with Stacey Abbott, Roger Luckhurst, and Kristopher Woofter) of The Routledge Companion to Global Horror, an authoritative transglobal and transmedial guide to horror studies.
Adam has held visiting professorships at Columbia University, New York University, and Tel Aviv University, and received a Macgeorge Fellowship from the University of Melbourne as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His current book in progress on the Jewish horror film has been supported by a Frankel Institute Fellowship from the Jean and Samuel Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan.
Adam has been interviewed widely on questions of cinema and culture for venues such as The New York Times, Time magazine, and Adam Simon’s documentary The American Nightmare. Through the support of Pitt’s University Center for International Studies, he is the Director of the Global Horror Studies Archival and Research Network. He also serves as the Faculty Fellow for the David C. Frederick Honors College’s “Horror Genre as a Social Force” scholar community at Pitt (https://www.frederickhonors.pitt.edu/community-engaged-learning/scholar-communities/horror-genre-social-force).
Courses Taught
• Horror Film: The Modern Era, 1960-Present
• Horror Film: The Classic Era, 1910-1960
• Horror Film: A Studio Art
• Cinema and Trauma
• Hitchcock’s Films: Cinema in Suspense
• Films of Stanley Kubrick: Cinematic Dreams, Cinematic Nightmares
• Film Directors: Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper
• Film Directors: John Carpenter and David Cronenberg
• Film Directors: Luis Buñuel and David Lynch
• Film Directors: David Cronenberg and Wes Craven
• Film Directors: David Cronenberg and George A. Romero
• Film Directors: George A. Romero and Stephanie Rothman
• Advanced Seminar in Film Studies: Cinema, the Ghostly Medium
• Advanced Seminar in Film Studies: Film Theory/Film Criticism
• Advanced Seminar in Film Studies: Theories of Media and Spectatorship
• Advanced Seminar in Film Studies: Cinema, Genre, and Embodiment
• Advanced Seminar in Film Studies: Theories of Genre and Spectatorship
• Science Fiction Film
• Introduction to Film
• Film and Literature: E.A. Poe, H.G. Wells, and the Nature of the Fantastic
• Film and Literature: Representing the Vietnam War
Affiliations
Founding Director, Horror Studies Center
Director, Horror Studies Working Group
Director, Global Horror Studies Archival and Research Network
Faculty Fellow, “Horror Genre as a Social Force” Scholar Community, David C. Frederick Honors College
Faculty Liaison, Horror Studies Archive, University Library System
Graduate Faculty, Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences
Film and Media Studies Program
Cultural Studies Program
Global Studies Program
Jewish Studies Program
University Center for International Studies
European Studies Center
Education & Training
- Ph.D. English (Cinema/Media), University of Chicago
- M.A. English (Cinema/Media), University of Chicago
- B.A. English/Psychology, University of Virginia
Representative Publications
• Horror Film and Otherness (Columbia University Press, 2022).
• Dreaming of Cinema: Spectatorship, Surrealism, and the Age of Digital Media (Columbia University Press, 2015).
• Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film (Columbia University Press, 2005).
• “Dawn of the Zombie Mall,” The New York Times (November 1, 2025): https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/01/opinion/romero-zombie-monroeville-mall-dawn-of-the-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.c1A.MaTB.uLgfLyM61brj&smid=url-share
• “Night of the Living Dead Helped Me Process the Tree of Life Massacre and Other Real-World Horrors,” The Conversation (October 30, 2025): https://theconversation.com/night-of-the-living-dead-helped-me-process-the-tree-of-life-massacre-and-other-real-world-horrors-267723
• “Men, Women, Chain Saws, and Horror Studies,” Journal of American Studies 58.4 (2024): 643-646. Special roundtable “‘The One Who Did Not Die’: Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws and the Legacy of the Final Girl,” eds. Ahmed Honeini and Nicole Gipson.
• “Acting Your Age: Social and Psychological Horror in The Amusement Park and Relic,” Discourse 44.3 (Fall 2022): 295-313. Special issue on Horror Grows Up?, eds. Jason Middleton, Adam Lowenstein, and Aviva Briefel.
• “Translating Individual and Collective Trauma Through Horror: The Case of George A. Romero’s Martin (1978),” in Languages of Trauma: History, Memory, and Media, eds. Peter Leese, Julia Barbara Köhne, and Jason Crouthamel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 293-309.
• “Nightmare Images: Tobe Hooper on Horror and Aging,” in American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper, eds. Kristopher Woofter and Will Dodson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021), 83-94.
• “Jordan Peele and Ira Levin Go to the Movies: The Black/Jewish Genealogy of Modern Horror’s Minority Vocabulary,” in Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 101-113.
• “A Detroit Landscape with Figures: The Subtractive Horror of It Follows,” Discourse 40.3 (Fall 2018): 358-369. Special dossier on Horror and the Aesthetics of Landscape, eds. Adam Lowenstein and Eugenie Brinkema.
• “The Jewish Cronenberg: A Cinema of Therapeutic Disintegration,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 15.2 (May 2017): 131-140. Special dossier on The Cronenberg Question, eds. Adam Lowenstein and Adam Charles Hart.
• “A Cinema of Disorientation: Space, Genre, Wheatley,” Critical Quarterly 58.1 (April 2016): 5-15. Special issue on Ben Wheatley, J.G. Ballard, and High-Rise, eds. Adam Lowenstein and Roger Luckhurst.
• “The Giallo/Slasher Landscape: Ecologia del delitto, Friday the 13th, and Subtractive Spectatorship,” in Italian Horror Cinema, eds. Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 127-144.
• “Feminine Horror: The Embodied Surrealism of In My Skin,” in The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, second edition, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015), 470-487.
• “Buñuel’s Bull Meets YouTube’s Lion: Surrealist and Digital Posthumanisms” in Animal Life and the Moving Image, eds. Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 58-71.
• “Spaces of Violence: History, Horror, and the Cinema of Kiyoshi Kurosawa,” in Killer Images: Documentary Film, Memory and the Performance of Violence, eds. Joram ten Brink and Joshua Oppenheimer (London and New York: Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2012), 136-151.
• “A Reintroduction to the American Horror Film,” in The Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film (4 vols.), eds. Cynthia Lucia, Roy Grundmann, and Art Simon (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), vol. 4, 154-176.
• “A Dangerous Method: Sight Unseen,” Film Quarterly 65.3 (Spring 2012): 24-32.
• “Spectacle Horror and Hostel: Why ‘Torture Porn’ Does Not Exist,” Critical Quarterly 53.1 (April 2011): 42-60.
• “Living Dead: Fearful Attractions of Film,” Representations 110 (Spring 2010): 105-128. Special forum on Fear Beyond the Disciplines, eds. Jan Plamper and Benjamin Lazier.
• “The Surrealism of the Photographic Image: Bazin, Barthes, and the Digital Sweet Hereafter,” Cinema Journal 46.3 (Spring 2007): 54-82.
Research Interests
Horror Studies, Trauma Studies, Jewish studies, Frankfurt School Film and Cultural Theory, Surrealism, Transnational Cinema Studies (US, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Israel, Italy, Japan), Art Cinema, Genre Cinema, Cinema and Media, Spectatorship Theory.