Professor George S. Semsel will be retiring after the fall 2007 quarter. This is your last chance to take one of his courses!

Professor Semsel has been teaching for more than forty years, most of them at Ohio University. Dr. Semsel earned his interdisciplinary doctorate at the Ohio State University, combining studies in photography and film with studies in curriculum development in higher education. He has a B.A. in literature from Wagner College and holds an M.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and a second, in film studies, from New York University, where he managed The Drama Review. Dr. Semsel, an experimentalist given to personal works akin to poetry, has been making films since 1953. During the Underground Film Movement of the 1960's, he was associated with Marie Menken and Willard Maas in the Gryphon Film Group. In 1984, Dr, Semsel spent a year working in the Chinese film industry, then under the Ministry of Culture. His first Fulbright sent him to Thailand, and his second had him teaching modern American literature and film at Shandong University in the People's Republic of China. A pioneer of Chinese film studies, Dr. Semsel published the first book on the subject following the cultural revolution and in two others introduced Chinese film theory to the U.S.