Daniel Bernardi

Who is Daniel Bernardi?

Daniel Bernardi is Professor and Chair of the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. He also directs the Documentary Film Institute at SFSU. Bernardi earned a Bachelor of Arts in Radio-TV and a Masters of Arts in Media Arts from the University of Arizona. He went on to earn a PhD in Film and Television Studies from UCLA. He completed a University of California postdoctoral research fellowship in 1997.

His main academic interests are: media studies, cultural studies, narrative theory, and rumors as narrative IEDS. His work in media, which is perhaps most known, emphasizes whiteness as a historical formation of meanings. Borrowing from Michael Omi and Howard Winant's theory of racial formation, he argues that whiteness is a historically powerful set of meanings that serves to either implicitly or explicitly dominate the shifting and reforming meaning of race in U.S. media.