Vernon Shetley
Professor of English
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Studies and teaches American poetry and film, focusing particularly on the postwar and contemporary periods.
My book Dark Film, Blood Money: The Economic Unconscious of American Neo-Noir Cinema (published by Intellect Books in 2026), explores noir filmmaking from the 1970s to the present, with a particular focus on the representation of economics within these films. Neo-noir, as I understand it, constitutes a powerful, if often oblique, representation of transformations in the economic and social life of the United States as postwar prosperity gave way to stagnation, alienation, and perceptions of crisis and decline.
I’ve published essays on a range of film- and poetry-related topics, including Scarlett Johansson’s sci-fi films, the horror film The Entity, and contemporary political poetry, as well as a discussion of the choreographer Merce Cunningham. I’m particularly proud of having co-authored articles with two former students, an interpretation of Blade Runner with Alissa Ferguson Phillips ‘97, and an exploration of the Olsen Twins’ late work with Lena McCauley ’10.
I teach a wide range of courses, from first-year writing to advanced courses on literature and film. In recent years, I've taught courses on literary theory, postwar poetry, and American short stories on the literature side, and courses on film noir, horror, and contemporary global cinema on the cinema side, as well as a section of first-year writing focused on romantic comedy. I'm teaching a new course on Alfred Hitchcock.
Education
- B.A., Princeton University
- M.A., Columbia University in the City of New York
- M.Phil, Columbia University in the City of New York
- Ph.D., Columbia University in the City of New York
Current and upcoming courses
Film Noir
ENG292
A journey through the dark side of the American imagination. Where classic Hollywood filmmaking trades in uplift and happy endings, Film Noir inhabits a pessimistic, morally compromised universe, populated by femmes fatales, hard-boiled detectives, criminals and deviants. This course will explore the development of this alternative vision of the American experience, from its origins in the 1940s, through the revival of the genre in the 1970s, to its ongoing influence on contemporary cinema. We’ll pay particular attention to noir’s redefinition of American cinematic style, and to its representations of masculinity and femininity. Films we are likely to watch include Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. We’ll also read a number of the gritty detective novels from which several of these films were adapted.
(AMST 292 and ENG 292 are cross-listed courses.)-
Romantic (and Unromantic) Comedy
WRIT140
"Boy meets girl" has long been a classic starting point, in both literature and the movies. This course will focus on romantic comedy in American cinema, with significant looks backward to its literary sources. We will view films from the classic era of Hollywood (It Happened One Night, The Awful Truth), the revisionist comedies of the 1970s and beyond (Annie Hall, My Best Friend's Wedding), and recent romantic comedies that extend our sense of the possibilities of the genre (Appropriate Behavior, Medicine for Melancholy). We will also read one or two Shakespeare plays, and a Jane Austen novel, to deepen our understanding of the literary precedents that inform romantic comedy onscreen.