Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (co-authored with Ella Shohat) won the Katherine Singer Kovács "Best Film Book" Award in 1994. Attempting to go beyond the methodological limitations of the then-dominant paradigm of “positive image” and “negative stereotype” analysis, Stam argued for an approach that emphasized not social accuracy or characterological merits but rather issues such as perspective, address, focalization, mediation, and the filmic orchestration of discourses. Francois Truffaut and Friends: Modernism, Sexuality, and Adaptation (Rutgers, 2006), meanwhile, explored the “transtextual diaspora” generated by a highly literary ménage-a-trois in the 1920s that led to the books and published journals of Henri-Pierre Roche, Franz Hessel and Helen Hessel, as well as three films by Truffaut based on the life and work of Roche ( Jules and Jim, Two Englishwomen, and The Man Who Loved Women). C. Berkeley in 1977, after which he went directly to New York University, where he has been teaching ever since. Stam has also been an advocate-exegete of semiotics, poststructuralism, and film theory in such books as New Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Poststructuralism, and Beyond (Routledge, 1992) and Film Theory: An Introduction (Blackwell, 2000), the first book to recount the history of film theory from its beginnings to the present within a transnational framework that included Latin America, Africa and Asia alongside Europe and North America.

Stam has also been a major figure within the “transtextual turn” in adaptation and intertextuality studies. Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation (Blackwell, 2005) offered a historicized account of key trends in the history of the novel – the proto-magic realism of a Cervantes, the colonialist realism of a Defoe (and his critics), the parodic reflexivity of a Henry Fielding or Machado de Assis, or proto-cinematic perspectivalism of a Flaubert, the neurotic narrators of a Dostoyevsky or a Nabokov, the feminist experimentations of Clarice Lispector and Marguerite Duras, and the “marvelous latin-american real” of Mario de Andrade and Alejo Carpentier, all as seen through the many filmic adaptations – both “faithful” and revisionist – of their work. For a more comprehensive bibliography, see Toby Miller and Robert Stam (eds), Film and Theory (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).

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Unthinking Eurocentrism addressed such issues as “Eurocentrism versus Polycentrism,” “Formations of Colonialist Discourse,” “The Imperial Imaginary,” “Tropes of Empire,” the “Esthetics of Resistance,” “postcolonial hybridity,” and “indigenous media. Still, Bakhtin is perhaps the most quoted theorist here so Stam inevitably managed to include some sections on him that I found satisfying.

að þetta sé ágætlega auðskyljanlegt að þá er þetta einn af helstu vöndum bókarinnar, og á þetta sér stað á nánast hverri einustu blaðsíðu. Stam's graduate work ranged across Anglo-American literature, French and Francophone literature, and Luso-Brazilian literature. Tropical Multiculturalism: A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture (Duke, 1997) offered the first book-length study in English of racial representation, especially of Afro-Brazilians, during the century of Brazilian Cinema, within a comparative framework in relation to similar issues in American cinema. Representation, Meaning, and Experience in the Cinema: A Critical Study of Contemporary Film Theory.

Para mim, o grande diferencial do livro é que a cada capítulo e teoria, o Stam primeiro apresenta sua principal ideia, faz você achar ela brilhante, para logo em seguida mostrar as críticas a ela, fazer você pensar que as críticas tem razão, e aí ao fim ele também se posiciona sobre o assunto.Stam has authored, co-authored and edited some seventeen books on film and cultural theory, literature and film, national cinema (French and Brazilian), aesthetic and politics, intellectual history, and comparative race studies and postcolonial studies. Stam and Shohat continued with an anthology entitled Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (Rutgers, 2003); followed by a more political polemic which excoriated the militaristic pseudo-patriotism of the George Bush/ Dick Cheney period -- Flagging Patriotism: Crises in Narcissism and Anti-Americanism (Routledge, 2006).