Pamela Robertson Wojcik

Pamela Robertson Wojcik is an American film scholar and academic, serving as the Andrew V. Tackes Professor of Film, Television, and Theatre and Chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame.

She holds concurrent appointments in Gender Studies and American Studies. A former president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, her work explores issues of modernity, urbanism, gender, mobility, and space in American cinema.

Biography Wojcik grew up in Braintree, Massachusetts, and earned a B.A. (magna cum laude, with honors) in English from Wellesley College in 1986, where she wrote a thesis on film noir. She proceeded to the University of Chicago, where she completed an M.A. (with honors) in English Language and Literature in 1988, receiving the J.A. Steiner Prize for best thesis for her essay on Preston Sturges. Her Ph.D. in English Language and Literature (1993) was also awarded by the University of Chicago; her dissertation was titled “Feminist Camp and the Female Spectator.”

She won the Society for Cinema Studies Dissertation Award.

Wojcik lives in Chicago with her husband, Rick Wojcik, who owns Dusty Groove, an online and bricks-and-mortar record store. She has two adult children. In 2020, she was awarded the Sheedy Award for Excellence in Teaching in the College of Arts and Letters.

Her first book, Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna (Duke University Press, 1996), redefined the concept of feminist camp by foregrounding female spectatorship and agency in popular culture.

She later shifted her attention to domestic and urban space in The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945–1975 (Duke University Press, 2010), which established the “apartment plot” as a distinct mode of narrative centered on postwar modernity and the redefinition of home.

Wojcik's monographs further extend her exploration of American film and cultural representation across multiple domains.

Her most recent book, Unhomed: Cycles of Mobility and Placelessness in American Cinema (University of California Press, 2024), examines cinematic portrayals of displacement, homelessness, and unstable belonging across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Alongside her monographs, Wojcik has edited a series of influential volumes include Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music (Duke University Press, 2001), co-edited with Arthur Knight; Movie Acting: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2004); New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s (Rutgers University Press, 2011); The Apartment Complex: Urban Living and Global Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2018); and Media Crossroads: Intersections of Space and Identity in Screen Cultures (Duke University Press, 2021), co-edited with Paula Massood and Angel Matos. Most recently, she co-edited with Paula Massood The Routledge Companion to American Film History (Routledge, 2025).