David Desser (born 1953) [1] is emeritus professor of cinema studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and former director of that university's Unit for Cinema Studies. [2] He is an expert in Asian cinema, particularly the cinema of Japan, as well as in Jewish cinema. He is the former editor of Cinema Journal, [3] which is published by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the world's largest organization of scholars of cinema and media. [4] He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema.