Miriam Hansen

Miriam Hansen (28 April 1949 – 5 February 2011) was a film historian who made important contributions to the study of early cinema and mass culture.

Career Born Miriam Bratu to Jewish parents, Arthur Egon Bratu and Ruth Bratu, in Offenbach, Germany, Hansen received a doctorate in American literature from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. She worked at Yale University and Rutgers before moving to the University of Chicago, where she served as Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the time of her death. According to Daniel Morgan of the University of Chicago, "She was in the first generation of scholars to see film viewing as a historically defined and shaped activity . . . And also to understand that that meant we had to look at older films through the lens of the viewers they were intended for.”

She died of cancer on 5 February 2011 in Chicago at the age of 61.