Seminar Studies Fictional Spy James Bond Through the Lens of Critical Theory from Bowdoin College on Vimeo.

He drinks, he smokes, he kills people, and he’s a misogynist, but on the other hand, he also frequently saves the world from evil. The fictional British spy James Bond has been entertaining audiences throughout the world since he was created by author Ian Fleming in the 1950s, but he may not seem to some a subject worthy of serious academic study. Not so, says Professor of Theater and Dance Sarah Bay-Cheng, who teaches Performance and Theory in James Bond as a first-year seminar. Bond is such an enduring character, she said, that he is ideally suited to serve as a medium through which to examine the cultural developments of the past six decades.