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 (Duke UP, 2003); Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Duke UP, 2010, available open access), and Undead: (Inter)(in)animation, Feminisms, and the Art of War (UC Press: Feminist Media Histories Series/Luminosoa, 2025, available open access). She has co-edited three volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (2008), 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 (Duke UP, 2014, available open access). She is currently collaborating with Kartik Nair on a coedited open-access volume tentatively titled “Course Projects: Film, Freedom, and Pedagogy” (forthcoming UC Press, Fall 2026) and is writing a new small-format book for a general audience on the cinematic telephone/telephonic cinema (under contract with Fordham University Press’s Cutaways series). 

As a faculty member, her top priority is to expand access to higher education and to foster classroom communities in which participants get to know their own minds, share and debate their thoughts with others, and pursue questions and topics that matter to them. She is the recipient of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ 2025 Distinguished Pedagogy Award.

Karen’s scholarship addresses the evolving role of film theory, war and the academy, violence and media, community media, animation, experimental and early cinema, feminism, intermediality, and 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. She has also 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, and was appointed as co-chair of the Scribe board in May 2025.