Peter Decherney Receives Penn Alumni Faculty Award of Merit

Peter Decherney, a professor of English and cinema studies in Penn Arts and Sciences, has received the 2017 Penn Alumni Faculty Award of Merit. This award recognizes a faculty member who has made outstanding contributions to alumni education and engagement by sharing his or her unique scholarship.

Decherney is the author or editor of six books, including Hollywood’s Copyright Wars: From Edison to the Internet and Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction. He has directed two short documentary films: Filmmaking for Democracy in Myanmar and the virtual reality film Kalobeyei, about a refugee settlement in Kenya. As the recipient of a Making a Difference in Diverse Communities grant from Penn Arts and Sciences, Decherney and a group of Penn students worked with FilmAid and student refugees in Kenya to make six short documentaries in the summer of 2017.

He holds a secondary appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication and an affiliation with the Center for Technology, Innovation, and Competition at Penn Law School. He is the faculty director of Penn’s campus-wide Online Learning Initiative and director of the Cinema and Media Studies Program.

Decherney has been an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scholar, a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a U.S. State Department Arts Envoy to Myanmar. He is an award-winning teacher, whose free online course (a MOOC) on the history of Hollywood is available through the edX platform. He is also a regular contributor to Forbes.