Peter Decherney Named Inaugural Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English

Peter Decherney, of the Department of English and the Cinema Studies Program in the School of Arts and Sciences, has been named the inaugural Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English.

Decherney, who holds a doctorate in cinema studies from New York University, came to Penn in 2004 from Johns Hopkins University. His research and teaching focus on the history of media regulation and on internet policy, specifically the interaction between Hollywood and Washington. He is the author of Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (Columbia University Press, 2005) and many articles on the Hollywood film industry, on the history of media regulation and on fair use and academia, among other topics. In 2006, along with two colleagues, he successfully petitioned for an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for media professors using clips for teaching. In addition to Penn and Johns Hopkins, Decherney has taught at Yale, Tsinghua University (Beijing) and King's College (London). He is currently working on a new book on the history and future of Hollywood and copyright law. Among other awards, Decherney was named a 2009 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholar and also recently received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

The Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professorship was established in 2008 by the Stephen M. Gorn Family Foundation to recruit and retain preeminent scholars and teachers for the Department of English in the School of Arts and Sciences. Mr. Gorn, C'84, PAR'08, PAR'11, is president and chief executive officer at Questar Properties, a developer of planned communities in the mid-Atlantic.