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Kara Keeling

Professor of Cinema and Media Studies and American Studies and Ethnicity
Email kkeeling@cinema.usc.edu Office Phone 213-740-3329

Biography

Kara Keeling is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts.

Kara Keeling’s most recent monograph, Queer Times, Black Futures, was published in 2019 by New York University Press. It considers the promises and pitfalls of imagination, technology, futurity, and liberation as they have persisted in and through racial capitalism by exploring how the speculative fictions of cinema, music, and literature that center black existence provide scenarios wherein we might imagine alternative worlds, queer and otherwise. Keeling’s first book, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Duke University Press, 2007), 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 co-editor (with Josh Kun) of Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, a collection of writings about sound and American Studies and (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. Keeling’s essays have appeared in the journals GLQ, Cinema Journal, Qui Parle, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere.

Education

  • Ph.D. Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Pittsburgh
    • Carolina Postdoctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001-2002

  • Tenure Track Appointments

    • Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California, 2021 –
    • Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago , 2018 – 2021

    Visiting and Temporary Appointments

    • Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, 2017-2018

  • Book

    • Keeling, K. (2019). Queer Times, Black Futures. New York: New York University Press.
    • Keeling, Kara and Josh Kun (Ed.). (2012). Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Johns Hopkins University Press.
    • Keeling, K. (2007). The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    • Snead, J. A., Keeling, K., MacCabe, C., West, C. (2003). Racist Traces and Other Writings: European Pedigrees, African Contagions- Selected Writings of James A. Snead. Palgrave McMillan.
    • USC Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2008-2009
    • National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African Cinema, 06/2005 – 07/2005

  • Committees

    • Member, 2008 –
    • Chair, 2008-2009

    Editorships and Editorial Boards

    • Editorial Board Member, Feminist Media Studies, 2011 –
    • Managing Editor, American Quarterly, 2008 –
    • Editorial Board Member, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 2007 –
    • Editorial Board Member, Cultural Studies, 2007 –

    Professional Memberships

    • Association for Cultural Studies, 2010 –
    • American Studies Association, 2001 –
    • Modern Language Association, 1995 –
    • Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 1995 –
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