Sabine Haenni, Assistant Professor in Film and American Studies, received her B.A. in English and Russian from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. She also earned a Diploma in American Studies from Smith College.

From 1999-2002 she taught as a Harper-Schmidt fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, before joining the Department of Theatre, Film and Dance and the American Studies Program at Cornell. Her publications include "Filming ŒChinatown¹: Fake Visions, Bodily Transformations" (in Screening Asian Americans, ed. Peter Feng, 2002); "Staging Methods, Cinematic Technique, and Spatial Politics" (in Cinema Journal, Spring 1998); "Visual and Theatrical Culture, Tenement Fiction, and the Immigrant Subject in Abraham Cahan¹s Yekl" (in American Literature, September 1999). She is currently working on a book entitled The Immigrant Scene: Movies, Theaters, and the Commercial Formation of Ethnic Public Cultures in New York City, 1880-1920.

Her areas of interest include American cinema, silent film, mass culture, cinema in the context of other media (including fiction and theater), theories of race and ethnicity, immigrant cultures, and urban studies.