Conference participants:

Michelle Baroody received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota in 2019. She is currently working on a book project that traces, constructs, and examines the Arab American archive, paying particular attention to film, literature, and cultural institutions. She has worked with the Arab/SWANA-based arts nonprofit Mizna in various capacities since 2012, serving as curator for the Mizna Film Series and annual Arab Film Festival. Baroody is also a co-director of Archives on Screen, Twin Cities.

Peter J. Bloom is Professor of Film and Media Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published extensively on British, French, and Belgian colonial media including French Colonial Documentary, Frenchness and the African Diaspora (co-editor), and Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (co-editor), among other publications. With a geographical focus on West Africa and Southeast Asia, he is preparing a monograph entitled, Radio-Cinema Modernity: The Catoptrics of Empire. He recently completed a co-edited volume with Dominique Jullien, entitled Screens and Illusionism: Alternative Teleologies of Mediation (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

Casey Coffee is a PhD candidate in the Film & Media Studies department at UC Santa Barbara. Casey holds a BA in English and an MA in Film & Media Studies, both from UCSB. Casey’s research on K-pop and Korean TV dramas uses a mixed approach of fan studies, media industry studies, and feminist studies to explore the complex relationships and interchanges between fan practices, social media platform affordances, and Korean media producers’ content and tactics.

Maria Corrigan is the author of Monuments Askew: An Elliptical History of the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press in 2025. She is an assistant professor of Media Studies and Comedy at Emerson College.

Katherine Groo is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Lafayette College. Her essays have appeared in The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Modernism/Modernity, Framework, Discourse, and Frames, as well as numerous edited collections. She is the author of Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and co-editor of New Silent Cinema (Routledge/AFI, 2015). In 2021, she was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship to support her second book project, Unindexical, which focuses on histories and concepts of referentiality in film and media studies. She is currently editing a special issue of Feminist Media Histories dedicated to historical methods.

Maggie Hennefeld is Professor of Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema (Columbia UP, 2024) and Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia UP, 2018), an editor of the journal Cultural Critique (UMN Press), and co-curator of Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), a DVD/Blu-ray set that spotlights 99 feminist silent films.

Sam Hunter is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media and fellow with the Center for Critical Internet Inquiry at UCLA whose research interests include queer media, digital networks, political economy, and critical theory. His dissertation, “Digital Queerdom: Utopian Desire and the Early Queer Internet,” shows how queer American activist, corporate, and consumer uses of computers during the 1990s and 2000s elicited hopes for new ways of making queer connections and community but also reinforced capitalist hegemony through those very relations. He has also recently published in New Queer Television: From Marginalization to Mainstreamification (Intellect Press, 2024).

Deborah Nadoolman Landis, PhD, is a costume designer, historian and endowed chair at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, as well as the Founding Director of the David C. Copley Center for Costume Design. Her design career includes Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Coming to America, and the groundbreaking music video Michael Jackson’s Thriller. She is the author or editor of six books including Dressed: A Century of Hollywood Costume Design. She has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences since 1988 and a Governor of the Costume Design Branch from 2013-2019. Landis is the editor-in-chief of the upcoming three-volume Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Film and Television Costume Design (2024), and Dressed: A History of Hollywood Costume Design, (2025).

Kartik Nair is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at Temple University. His first book, Seeing Things, is about the production of horror films in 1980s India, and his current research examines the physical pipelines of digital imagery.

Dr. Miriam Petty is Associate Dean for Academic Programs in the Graduate School at Northwestern University and Associate Professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. Petty writes and teaches about race, stardom, and performance and is especially interested in the history of African American representation in Hollywood film. Her work has been featured in Genders, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and the Journal of Popular Musical Studies. She is the author of Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (University of California Press, 2016), as well as the forthcoming Madea’s Baby, Tyler’s Maybe: Tyler Perry’s Plays and Films, 1997-2019. Petty is a current member of the Library of Congress’ National Film Preservation Board.

Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto is Associate Professor of Film at Columbia University. She is a film and media historian whose areas of research include transnational cinema and television, feminist film histories, and documentary. Elizabeth is the author of (Un)veiling Bodies: A Trajectory of Chilean Post-Dictatorship Documentary (Legenda, 2019) and coeditor of Nomadías: El cine de Marilú Mallet, Valeria Sarmiento y Angelina Vázquez (Metales Pesados, 2016). She is also the coeditor of several special issues or sections which have been published in Jump Cut, Film Quarterly, and Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas (forthcoming). Her work has appeared in journals like Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Feminist Media Histories and [in]Transition.

Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at UCLA. Her work focuses on representations and theorizations of violence in film, media, and social media. She is the author of The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Mythopoetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity (Columbia University Press, 2017), Digital Uncanny (Oxford University Press, 2019) and is currently working on a co-authored book project with Martine Beugnet entitled The Trouble with Ghosts (forthcoming Oxford University Press).

Gayle Salamon is Professor of English at Princeton University. Her research interests include phenomenology, feminist philosophy, queer and transgender theory, contemporary Continental philosophy, and disability studies.  She is the author of Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (Columbia University Press, 2010) winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies, and The Life and Death of Latisha King:  A Critical Phenomenology of Transphobia (NYU Press, 2018) which uses phenomenology to explore the case of Latisha King, a trans girl who was shot and killed in her Oxnard, California junior high school.  Her most recent book is 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology (Northwestern University Press, 2020), co-edited with Ann Murphy and Gail Weiss.

Iman Salty is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UCSB. Her research focuses on German art and visual culture between the World Wars, with interests in the relations between visual culture and class politics. Her dissertation examines the rise of Germany’s Worker-Photography Movement in Weimar Germany and its entanglements with left-wing politicians and the avant-garde to probe questions around class identity, art, and education during this fraught historical period. Iman is also an amateur photographer and brings technical and practical insight into her art historical research.

Girish Shambu is Professor of Management at Canisius University, and has a dual career writing about cinema. His work has appeared in Framework Journal of Film & Media, Criterion Collection, and Film Quarterly, where he was editor of the journal’s online column, Quorum. He is the author of The New Cinephilia (2nd ed., 2020).

Marcel Strobel is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research centers on modern and contemporary German literature and culture, with a specialization in gender and queer studies, particularly focusing on queer and trans experiences during the Weimar Republic and the Holocaust. Until recently, he was the Duane Rath Endowment Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. Marcel has a forthcoming book chapter on male sex work, transgender identity, and respectability politics in the 1919 film Different from the Others, which will be published in the edited volume Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, and Resistance of the Palgrave Literary Urban Studies Series.

Jasmine Nadua Trice is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her book, City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila Film Culture was published by Duke University Press in 2021. She is currently working on a second book project on spatial practices in Southeast Asian film organizing, coauthored with Dr. Philippa Lovatt of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Kristen Warner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Performing and Media Arts at Cornell University.  She is the author The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (Routledge, 2015). Kristen’s research interests are centered at the juxtaposition of racial representation and its place within the film and television industries as it concerns issues of labor and employment. Her work can be found in academic journals, a host of anthologies and online platforms.

Moderators:

Paul Kim is a PhD candidate in the Film and Media Studies department at UC Santa Barbara. He works broadly at the intersection of critical AI studies, critical race studies, and visual studies. His research considers recommender systems, racial affect, and performativity. He is a graduate researcher for the intercampus project AI Forensics, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung Artificial Intelligence and the Society of the Future grant.

Alex Lilburn is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a BA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute. Prior to coming to UCSB, he worked at the Sundance and Telluride Film Festivals and volunteered at Canyon Cinema in San Francisco. Currently, his research interests include avant-garde media practices, critical Indigenous studies, and spatial techniques of placemaking.

Kelsey Moore is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. She holds an MA in Cinema and Media from USC, and she previously worked as an assistant digital media archivist for the Sherman Grinberg Film Library. Her research considers the relationship between digital practices of appraisal and preservation, and how differing archival spheres and visual records influence (inter)national and communal memories of the WWII Japanese American incarceration.

Chelsea Kai Roesch is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she studies digital media, internet culture, and tech labor. She holds an M.A. in Film and Media Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara and a B.A. in Media and Cultural Studies from Hampshire College. She is a University of California Regents Fellow and has received awards from the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at UCSB, and Spain’s Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. Chelsea is the organizer of the Alt-Right Media Literacy Series—a speaker series aimed at understanding the new visual language of the Right online. Chelsea is currently conducting research on digital women’s work on online casinos.

Althea Wasow is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UCSB. Currently, she is revising her monograph, Moving Images/Modern Policing: Silent Cinema and Its Afterlives, which analyzes the complicity and resistance between police power and motion pictures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is also developing a Bert Williams essay film, Nobody: In Search of Bert Williams and the Emergence of Global Black Cultural Production (fiscal sponsor: Aubin Pictures), and conducting research on the relationship between Vandenberg Space Force Base and the Federal Correctional Complex in Lompoc, California, as Co-Primary Investigator of The Satellite Coast project (with PI Lisa Parks, UCSB, and Co-PI Carlos Jimenez Jr., University of Denver).

Conference organizers:

Patrice Petro is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Dick Wolf Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center, and Presidential Chair in Media Studies. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of fourteen books, including Uncanny Histories in Film and Media Studies (2022), The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (with Kristin Hole, Dijana Jelaca, and E. Ann Kaplan, 2017), Teaching Film (2012), Idols of Modernity: Movie Stars of the 1920s (2010), Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (2006), and Aftershocks of the New: Feminism and Film History (2002). She served two terms as President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the largest U.S. professional organization for college and university educators, filmmakers, historians, critics, scholars, and others devoted to the study of the moving image.

Amy Villarejo is chair of the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at UCLA, which she joined as a professor in 2020 after spending 23 years at Cornell University.  She is the author of Lesbian Rule:  Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire (Duke 2003) and Ethereal Queer:  Television, Historicity, Desire (Duke 2014).  With Ron Gregg, she recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema (Oxford 2021).  Her essays have appeared in journals such as Film Quarterly, JCMS, GLQ, Social Text, New German Critique, and in many edited volumes.