JUDITH THISSEN (1962) is associate professor of cinema history in the Department of Media and Culture. She is trained in Paris in Film Studies (Paris 8) and Archeology (Paris 1) and holds a PhD in Arts and Humanities from Utrecht University. Her research interests reach across fields into social history, urban history and Jewish studies. She teaches in the Bachelor program Media & Culture and the Research Master Media, Art and Performance Studies.

Thissen is specialized in the history of cinemagoing in the United States. Most of her early research deals with the dynamics of Jewish immigrant film culture in New York City around 1900, when the movies radically transformed the leisure patterns of working-class America. In her new project - Kol Nidre on Broadway, Jazz Singers in Shul - she ventures into the 1920s to explore how the engagement with the cinema and other new media helped to modernize Jewish religious practices. For this research, she received a senior fellowship from the Max-Weber-Kolleg for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt to participate in the DFG-program Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations (Winter 2020/21). 

Over the past few years, the focus of Judith's work has partly shifted from the big city to the countryside and from American to European cinema history. With  Clemens Zimmermann (Universität des Saarlandes), she edited Cinema Beyond the City, the first anthology on small-town and rural film culture in Europe (British Film Institute, 2017). Her own research in this field focusses on the relationship between moviegoing and rural modernization in the Netherlands and France.

Thissen has a strong interest in comparative history, interdisciplinary collaborations, and the use of Digital Humanities techniques for understanding film and theatre history. She is an active member of the Digital Cinema Studies network (DICIS), the Digital Yiddish Theater project and HoMER, an international  research network of scholars whose work deals with the History of Moviegoing, Exhibition and Reception.