(Offenbach, Germany, 1949 - Chicago, 2011) was an outstanding film historian and theorist. She was born as Miriam Bratu in a family of Jewish origin, she in 1975 she obtained a doctorate at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt. She immigrated to the United States and worked at Yale and Rutgers universities. But, it was at the University of Chicago, in her College of Humanities, where she developed most of her work as a professor for two decades. There, she achieved emeritus recognition as Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor and served as founding director of her current Film and Media Studies Department. She is the author of numerous articles on film history and theory, in 1991 she published Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, a pioneering work in the history of American cinema. Cinema and Experience, a top study on the relationship between cinema and the Frankfurt School, was published posthumously in 2011.