Katherine Groo

Courses:
FAMS 101:      Introduction to Film & Media
FAMS 103:      Foundations in Writing and Research
FAMS 220:      Film Theory
FAMS 221:      Media Theory
FAMS 237:      Celluloid Ghosts
FAMS 275:      World Pictures
FAMS 351:      Minor Cinemas
FAMS 355:      Cinema is Dead, Long Live Cinema: Moving Images in the 21st Century
FAMS 385:      Educating the Ear
FAMS 420:      FAMS Capstone

Research and Teaching Interests:

I teach classes on film history, early and silent-era cinema, minor media practices (found footage, home movies, amateur and orphan works), visual culture, media archaeology, and sound theory. Before arriving at Lafayette, I directed the Film and Visual Culture program at the University of Aberdeen in northeast Scotland.

In my first book, Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), I explore approaches to film history, film archives, and film artifacts. I am interested in the ways we write and think about film history and archival research, and the development of film history as a field in film studies.

In 2020, I was awarded the Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers to conduct research on my second book, Images at the End of the World: Historicity and Mourning in the Twenty-First Century. In this project, I examine the nature of the relationship between contemporary modes of visual representation and history. I study the ways that new media function as historical artifacts—how they often compel viewers to mourn, experience nostalgia, or encounter the specters of past time—despite their seeming lack of artifactual authority. I will complete this research at the Humboldt University in Berlin during the 2021-2022 academic year.

Selected Publications:

Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive (University of Minnesota Press, 2019)

New Silent Cinema (co-editor) (Routledge/AFI, 2015)

“Let It Burn: Film Historiography in Flames,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 41:1 (2020)

“Mixed Media: Ethno-zoography and the Archives de la Planète,” in The Zoo: Images of Exhibition and Encounter, co-edited by Michael Lawrence and Karen Lury (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)

“Alice in the Archives” in New Silent Cinema, co-edited by Katherine Groo and Paul Flaig (Routledge/AFI, 2015), 17–37

“The Maison and Its Minor: Lumière(s), Film History, and the Early Archive,” Cinema Journal 52:4 (Summer 2013): 25–48

“Shadow Lives: Josephine Baker and the Body of Cinema,” Framework 54:1 (Spring 2013): 7–39

“Cut, Paste, Stutter, Glitch: Remixing Silent Film History” Frames 1:1 (2012)

Works in Progress:

“Weird Loops: Drone Cinemas, Climate Change, and the Work of Mourning,” forthcoming in Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, eds. James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati (American Film Institute/Routledge, 2019)

“Body Parts” forthcoming in Undone: The Feminist Possibilities of the Unfinished Film, eds. Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon (University of California Press, Feminist Media Histories Series)