Román Gubern (Barcelona, 1934) has been a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, professor at the South California University (Los Ángeles) and the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena), director of the Cervantes Institute of Rome and president of the Spanish Association of Film Historians. Nowadays, he is professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad Autónoma of Barcelona, member of the New York Academy of Sciences, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and member of the Honour Committee of the International Association for Visual Semiotics. He has been awarded the Ciudad de Barcelona Prize for Patologías de la imagen in 2005.