Richard Allen (middle name William, born 1959) is an Anglo-American film scholar. He is currently Chair Professor of Film and Media Art at the School of Creative Media City University of Hong Kong, and Director for the Center of Applied Computing and Interactive Media, where he runs a series of grant-funded projects in interactive, immersive media in collaboration with Professor Jeffrey Shaw (HKBU) including City in Time. Allen is a Fellow of the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image.
Born in South London, Allen attended Ashford Grammar School before reading Philosophy Politics and Economics at St. John's College, Oxford, where he was head of the Oxford University Film Society. He subsequently earned an MA in Film Studies from the University of East Anglia, where he taught for a year, and a PhD in Theater Arts from UCLA. For 27 years, Allen was Professor of Cinema Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, where he served as Head of Department for a total of 10 years. He joined City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) as Dean of the School of Creative Media, a position he held for 8 years (2016âÂÂ2024).
With his first book, Projecting Illusion, a psychoanalytically informed defence of an illusion theory of representation, Allen established a reputation as a film theorist writing in the broad tradition of analytical philosophy, which was consolidated by the publication of two co-edited volumes in Film Theory and Philosophy, with Murray Smith, and Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, with Malcolm Turvey. He subsequently branched out into the study of the poetics and aesthetic of film.
Allen is perhaps most well-known as a Hitchcock scholar. He directed the Hitchcock Centennial Conference at NYU, and he is author of the widely-praised book, Hitchcock's Romantic Irony, and numerous articles on the master of suspense. He is the co-editor of three anthologies on Hitchcock and for many years he co-edited, with Sidney Gottlieb, the journal of record in Hitchcock Studies, The Hitchcock Annual.
Allen has also published extensively on Indian Cinema. Together with Ira Bhaskar (formerly Professor of Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University) he wrote Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema which accompanied a film festival they curated in Abu Dhabi and New York. They also co-edited the volume, Bombay Cinema's Islamicate Histories, which was nominated for the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award in 2023. Allen's most recent book is Storytelling in Hindi Cinema: Doubles, Deception, and Discovery, to be published by Bloomsbury.
Allen's current research lies in melodrama, in particular, the relationship between melodrama and affective piety, and he has published several articles on the topic.