Kara Keeling

Professor of Cinema and Media Studies

Keeling lives in Los Angeles and works at the University of Southern California, where she is appointed as Professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts. Keeling's research has focused on Black and queer media, representations of race, sexuality, and gender in cinema and media, film philosophy, digital media and technology, and cultural studies.

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, The Black Scholar, Women and Performance, and elsewhere.