Karen Redrobe

Karen Redrobe (she/her) is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor and Undergraduate Chair in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies. She has served as Department Chair of History of Art, Director of the Wolf Humanities Center, Advisor to the Arts for the University, Diversity Search Advisor for the Humanities, and Director of the Program in Cinema and Media Studies. She is the author of Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (2003); Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (2010), and a new book, Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War (forthcoming, Spring 2025). She has co-edited three volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (2008) and On Writing With Photography (2013) with Liliane Weissberg, and Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Digital Cultures with Jeff Scheible (2021), winner of SCMS’s Best Edited Collection Award. She is also the editor of Animating Film Theory (2014). She is currently collaborating with Kartik Nair on a coedited volume that explores questions of freedom, discipline and change in and through the Cinema and Media Studies classroom. As a faculty member, her top priority is to expand access to higher education.

Karen’s scholarship is rooted in film and media theory. Her scholarship addresses a range of subjects, including the evolving role of film theory, war and the academy, violence and media, community media, animation, experimental and early cinema, feminism, and moving images in contemporary art. For several years she served as a senior editor of the MIT journal Grey Room and is now a member of its editorial board and has served on PMLA advisory board. Since 2019, she has been on the Board of Directors for Scribe Video Center, a media center for social change founded in 1982 by Louis Massiah.

Courses include: Introduction to Cinema Studies; Global Film Theory; Participatory Community Media 1967-Present; Cinema and Media Studies Methods; Reading Against Racism; African Film and Media; Cinema and Civil Rights; Introduction to Film Theory; The Place of Film Theory; The Art of Animation; War and Film; Art and Resistance; Cinema and Photography; Race, Sex and Gender in Early Cinema; Women and Film; Film History; The Road Movie; and Paul Strand. She is a member of graduate groups in the departments of Comparative Literature, English, FIGS (Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies), and the History of Art; a member of the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies; a faculty affiliate of the LGBT center; and a First-Generation/Low-Income (FGLI) Student ally.