Robert Burgoyne is professor of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His work centers on historiography and film, with a special emphasis on American cinema, history and national identity, and the counter narratives of nation that have emerged in many films.

Recent publications include Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U. S. History: Revised and Expanded Edition, and The Epic Film in World Culture. He has also published on memory and contemporary American culture, cinephilia in the work of Douglas Gordon and Corey Arcangel, and the imagery of haunting and spectrality in the war film. Narrative theory, Italian cinema, and the impact of digital technologies on film form and theory are also subjects on which he has worked, and which he continues to pursue. Much of Burgoyne’s recent research flows from his central interest in the cinematic rewriting of history, and the power of film to illuminate the contemporary moment by reconceiving the dominant fictions that have formed around the past.