Getty taps Rosenstone

Professor of History Robert Rosenstone will soon join the ranks of researchers at the Getty Center in Brentwood. He will join the center’s research arm in September as a Getty Scholar, concentrating in biography on film.

Rosenstone has been at Caltech for 35 years, and in the last decade, he has divided his time between teaching here and writing about historical film from a variety of countries. “I deal always with film from around the world, so I’m not just an American when it comes to film,” he said.

Rosenstone has also written two biographies; it was Romantic Revolutionary , his biography of John Reed, that was used as the basis for the 1981 feature film Reds. Rosenstone served as a historical consultant for that project as well.

His year at the Getty will be spent researching how well films capture a past life and then bringing those works and his findings into the larger discourse of history. As broad in scope as the topic of biographical film is, Rosenstone will feel his way around and see what develops. “I’m really at the beginning of this project,” he said. “I’m not sure what the shape of it is yet.”
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