Retiring in 2026 after 40 years, Lewis leaves behind a legacy of teaching film studies to over 15,000 students and writing nearly 20 books dissecting 20th century film history
Jon Lewis
By Hoku Tiwanak, CLA Student Writer - April 6, 2026
Jon Lewis, University Distinguished Professor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, hadn’t set out to become a film scholar. In fact, for a time, he was certain he’d be a novelist. In the 1960s, growing up on Long Island, New York, Lewis was always a “good student,” and prioritized going to college because his parents didn’t get that chance.
At Hobart College in upstate New York, Lewis studied English and was still planning to enter the literary world. With no prior interest in film, a showing of 1947 noir/thriller Out of the Past at Hobart, starring Robert Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, and Jane Greer, was an experience Lewis said, “felt like a lightning bolt.”
“I had an epiphany. I absolutely understood what I was looking at in a way that I never felt with literature,” said Lewis in a 2017 oral history project for Oregon State’s sesquicentennial. Film became more than entertainment; it became a way of reading the world for Lewis. Yet, Hobart didn’t offer any film courses, so he “left it at that.”
In 1977, Lewis started an M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Buffalo, still hoping to become a novelist, but things began to change. After some lukewarm feedback from Buffalo’s writing faculty, an uneasy truth began to settle in. He didn’t actually want to teach creative writing. And he wasn’t sure he wanted to be a novelist anymore, either. What he did know was that the path he was on wasn’t quite right, but he had no alternative in mind.
Then, chance intervened. At a career‑day‑type event, Lewis struck up a conversation with a recruiter from the University of Southern California (USC) who was promoting a Ph.D. program in literature. Lewis, not keen on the literature program the recruiter was selling, mentioned his enjoyment of film. The recruiter smiled and said something that changed everything, “You do know you can get a PhD in film studies.”
Jon hadn’t known. But the moment the possibility landed, it clicked. Within months he was headed to Los Angeles, but not to USC’s film program, instead at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), sight unseen, never having set foot in LA.
LA hit him like a revelation. “Awesome,” Lewis would add later. The scale, the sprawl, the cultural buzz, it was all thrilling. He moved into the Miracle Mile, an older Jewish neighborhood that felt worlds away from the Hollywood icons he was studying, but close enough to feel the industry’s pulse.
“As a student in film, you couldn’t ask for anything better,” he said recently. UCLA was paying him to study film history while living in the capital of the industry itself.
Initially he imagined himself a theorist, but was gradually pulled into cultural history as he progressed in his program. His dissertation examined the films of Marilyn Monroe and Jerry Lewis as cultural artifacts of 1950s America, asking what those stars revealed about postwar masculinity, feminism, power, and ideology. He examined Jerry Lewis as a symbol of a crisis in masculinity following the war, and Marilyn Monroe as a complicated feminist icon forged by a culture struggling with its own expectations of femininity.
While earning his doctorate, Lewis stepped into the industry as a market researcher at Lieberman Research West, an advertising company in the film industry. He saw firsthand how volatile Hollywood could be and understood that the “constant hustle” wasn’t his style. Academia offered something different. It was a path that felt stable and a role he found deeply fulfilling. Lewis wasn’t interested in making movies. He was interested in understanding them.
Lewis landed a visiting professorship at his alma mater Hobart College for a year where he taught film studies. Then, in 1982, he interviewed for a position in the English department at OSU. The English department was looking to branch out and attract more students by offering film courses (which would help to fund more traditional offerings), which worked in his favor as a film historian and not a producer. Lewis flew up to Corvallis to meet with English chair Bob Frank.
“It was a really traditional department,” said Lewis. “I was definitely not what the doctor ordered for a lot of people in the department, I'm sure…I could read a room, and I could definitely see people sort-of rolling their eyes and asking ‘What are we doing? We can't hire this Hollywood guy.’”
And yet, the department needed a film historian and one with credentials. Lewis was brought aboard and started teaching in the fall of 1983.
When he first arrived, OSU offered two film courses, “Film Comedy” and “Film Tragedy,” both taught by a Charles Dickens scholar. Essentially developing a curriculum from scratch, Lewis started by asking himself: “What do students need to know about film in the short time I have with them?”
“If an OSU student comes in and only takes one film class, then they should have some film literacy,” Lewis said. “They should understand how films operate in a kind of cultural history.” From the beginning, his focus was not on plot or performance, but on context. Understanding movies as reflections of politics, economics, and culture.
The teaching of film in 1983 looked very different from what it does today. There was no streaming, DVDs, or YouTube. Showing a film required advance booking through a campus office, often weeks ahead of time, like scheduling a theatrical run. Clips could not be shown instantly on a projector during classes like they are today.
He described himself as essentially the same teacher he was decades ago, extremely passionate and comfortable in front of the class. What has changed is his perspective. After becoming a parent himself, he’s grown more understanding of students’ lives and daily pressures.
Professors often begin their careers wondering why students aren’t exactly like them. They were exceptional students who genuinely loved school. With time, he came to see his role less as expecting students to mirror him and more as meeting them where they are.
Reflecting on his time at OSU, he said he “couldn’t imagine a better place to have been. I did the right thing by coming here. I’ve seen everything, but I am still surprised by students. I’m lucky that film is engaging and that students want to keep learning.”
Over time, he became a one‑man department of sorts. Without GTAs and with separate class sections, he estimates he taught somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 students. It became the defining joy of his career. “The best times,” he said, “were working with students.”
And yet Lewis still wrote, constantly. 18 books over the years, each shaped by his curiosity and his commitment to understanding Hollywood from the angles others overlooked. His first book, The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture (1992), emerged from a teaching stint in Bath, England. While in the UK, he became fascinated by the emerging scholarship on British youth culture. The book, published by Routledge, developed his argument that teen films functioned as a kind of “conservative re-assurance,” a promise that adolescence, with all its instability and angst, wouldn’t last forever.
His breakthrough and perhaps most impactful book remains Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry (2000); a book Lewis has said “put him on the map.” By tracing film censorship debates from the 1930s through the 1990s, he argued that film censorship is driven by money and not morality. The book was reviewed in Sunday’s The New York Times Book Review and selected as a “New and Noteworthy” paperback. For an academic book to receive mainstream newspaper reviews was rare. It was proof that his questions about power, morality, money, and control resonated.
Other books by Lewis include exposés of Hollywood blacklists, countercultural influence, the meaning of celebrity and stardom, the role of independent cinema, and Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather. His favorite among the books he’s written is Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Post-war Los Angeles (2017), which follows the lives of aspiring actors who never found success in Hollywood. Rather than spotlighting stars, Lewis examined the film industry through those left behind and tells the history of people at the margins and working behind the scenes.
“We tend to focus on celebrity history,” he said, “but that’s not the entirety of what makes up history.”
After 40 years of teaching, Lewis is retiring from the School of Writing, Literature, and Film and OSU after spring term 2026. He leaves behind a legacy of film literacy, of students who learned to see movies not just as stories, but as artifacts of culture, politics, and history.
“You don’t stay at a place for this long if you don’t have great colleagues,” concluded Lewis. “I found a world that made sense to me, as a film historian working in academia, and I can’t imagine a better place to have been. I did the right thing about coming to OSU and that’s made me happy.”
Lewis often describes the 1970s as a glorious era of American cinema, intertwined with his own coming of age as a filmgoer. Nothing, he says, quite compares to watching The Godfather or Apocalypse Now for the first time. For Lewis, movies are time capsules; they are, in a sense, markers of his life lived alongside cinema.
He remains fascinated by Los Angeles and by postwar cultural history. He plans to continue writing, still offering perspectives about how we should understand history through film, and not just through the famous and the successful, but through the overlooked and sidelined.
He is not finished asking what movies can teach us about who we are.
On Saturday, May 2, join the OSU community to honor Jon Lewis at his last lecture. Lewis will share surprising insights, film clips, and his inimitable perspective as a University Distinguised Professor and American film scholar. Free and open to all. RSVP here.