Dorothy Knowles (academic)

Dorothy Knowles (28 March 1906 – 10 November 2010) was a British academic, known to her friends as Diana. She was an analyst of French drama who taught at Liverpool University from 1934 to 1967. She was also an accomplished fencer. Knowles is known to historians of British cinema for her 1934 book The Censor, the Drama and the Film, in which she criticised the British Board of Film Censors for what she regarded as unaccountable political censorship. In 1989 she published a study of the work of the playwright Armand Gatti.