Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Film and Media Studies, Rob King, has been announced as the recipient of the 2026 Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching awarded by Columbia College. Established in 1962 in honor of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, playwright, critic, editor, and biographer Mark Van Doren, the award recognizes one faculty member annually for their humanity, devotion to truth, and inspiring leadership.
“Of course the obvious thing to say would be that I'm deeply honored and grateful—to all the students, staff, and faculty at the School of the Arts,” said King. “I've spent the last few years researching why AI isn't as good at telling jokes as humans. I hope the same will always be true of teaching.”
King is a film and media historian with interests in American genre cinema, popular culture, and cultural history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (2009) examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. His follow-up, Hokum! The Early Sound Slapstick Short and Depression-Era Mass Culture (2017), challenged the received wisdom that sound destroyed the slapstick tradition. Departing from comedy, King’s most recent book is a critical biography of adult filmmaker Radley Metzger, Man of Taste: The Erotic Cinema of Radley Metzger (Columbia University Press, 2025). He is also the co-editor of five anthologies: Early Cinema and the National (2008), Slapstick Comedy (2010), Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema (2012), Cornell Woolrich and Transmedia Noir (2023), and The Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema (2024). King is currently working on a media archaeology of computational humor.
