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 that is under contract with UC Press, tentatively titled “Film, Freedom, and Pedagogy,” and is writing a new small-format book on the cinematic telephone/telephonic cinema for 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.

Courses include: Cinema on the Brink of Revolution (with Michael Hanchard); Introduction to Cinema Studies; Global Film Theory (with Meta Mazaj); Participatory Community Media 1967-Present (with Louis Massiah); Cinema and Media Studies Methods; Reading Against Racism; African Film and Media (with Dagmawi Woubshet); Cinema and Civil Rights; Introduction to Film Theory; The Place of Film Theory; The Art of Animation; War and Film; Art and Resistance (with Sharon Hayes); Cinema and Photography; Race, Sex and Gender in Early Cinema (with Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw); Women and Film; Film History; The Road Movie; and Paul Strand (with Peter Barberie). 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; core faculty in 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.

Karen and Jeff Scheible (King’s College, London) are in conversation with Jules O’Dwyer (Cambridge) about Deep Mediations: Thinking Space in Cinema and Media Studies on the New Books Network. Click HERE to listen to this podcast episode.

Office Hours

Fall Office Hours: Thursday 2-4pm, and by appointment. During the semester, please sign up at: https://redkaren.youcanbook.me/.