Oliver Gaycken received his BA in English from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His teaching interests include silent-era cinema history, the history of popular science, and the links between scientific and experimental cinema. He has published on the discovery of the ophthalmoscope, the flourishing of the popular science film in France at the turn of the 1910s, the figure of the supercriminal in Louis Feuillade's serial films, and the surrealist fascination with popular scientific images. He is currently writing about the figure of the detective/scientist in the films of Billy Wilder and conducting research into the American popular science film before 1920. His book project is entitled Devices of Curiosity: Cinema and the Scientific Vernacular.