David Sterritt is a scholar of American and European film history, theory, and criticism, including intersections of film, literature, and music.

His courses at MICA include History of Film, Film as Art, Avant-Garde Film, and Reality, Illusion, and the Moving Image, which are among his MICA courses. He is Editor-in-Chief of Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Contributing Writer for Cineaste, and Editorial Board member of the Hitchcock Annual, Journal of Beat Studies, and Journal of Modern Literature. He served two terms as chair of the New York Film Critics Circle, ten years as chair of the National Society of Film Critics, and ten years as co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar on Cinema and Interdisciplinary Interpretation. His fifteen books include The Films of Alfred Hitchcock (Cambridge University Press), Spike Lee’s America (Polity), The Cinema of Clint Eastwood: Chronicles of America (Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press), and The Beats: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press). He has lectured at the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard Film Archive, and many other venues, and his writing has appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, The New York Times, Journal of American History, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and many other publications as well as numerous edited collections. He is a former member of the New York Film Festival Selection Committee and was Film Critic of The Christian Science Monitor for decades.