Kara Keeling, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor

213.740.3334
kkeeling@cinema.usc.edu
SCA 320

Kara Keeling’s research focuses on Third Cinema and feminist film, representations of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema, critical theory, cultural studies, and African cinema. Her book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life.

Keeling is author of several articles published in anthologies and journals and co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing. Currently, Keeling is writing her second monograph, tentatively entitled “Digital Media and Social Movements,” and completing several essays on topics such as temporality, cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory.

Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Keeling taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and was an adjunct assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and a visiting assistant professor of Art and Africana Studies at Williams College. Keeling has developed and taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on topics such as Media and Activism, Cinema and Social Change, Race, Sexuality, and Cinema, and Film As Cultural Critique, among others. In the summer of 2005, Keeling participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African Cinema in Dakar, Senegal. She currently serves as an Elected Representative to the Modern Language Association's Division on Film and on the editorial board of the journal Cultural Studies.