Katherine Groo

Courses:
FAMS 101:      Introduction to Film & Media
FAMS 203:      The Craft of Film & Media Studies
FAMS 220:      Film Theory
FAMS 221:      Media Theory
FAMS 237:      Celluloid Ghosts
FAMS 351:      Minor Cinemas
FAMS 355:      Cinema is Dead, Long Live Cinema
FAMS 385:      Educating the Ear
FAMS 420:      FAMS Capstone

Research and Teaching Interests:

I teach classes on media theory, twenty-first century moving images, and contemporary media-historical methods. I served as Lecturer of Film and Visual Culture, Program Director, and Co- Director of the George Washington Wilson Center for Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen from 2009 to 2016. I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a concentration in Film and Video Studies from Cornell University in 2009. I was trained in early and silent-era cinema, twentieth-century ethnography and the avant-garde, and film and media theory. When large-scale digitization projects began to transform moving-image collections, my research shifted to consider just what digitization means for the artifactuality and historicity of contemporary images. My current areas of research interest include twentieth and twenty-first century media; contemporary AI, machine learning, and computational art; comparative media studies; feminist media histories; critical theory; archive studies; and philosophies of history and reference.

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. This work moves across anthropology, historical studies, literary theory, and film and media studies to make the case for new approaches to the historical study of moving images. In Bad Film Histories, I argue that early ethnographic cinema resists our efforts to write and recover early film history and, in so doing, poses a number of important questions to the recuperative historiographies that have shaped the practice and writing of film history for decades. I also am the co-editor of New Silent Cinema (Routledge/AFI, 2015), a collection that explores twenty-first century returns to silent cinema in popular and avant-garde film, contemporary art, literature, and new media. I am currently editing, by invitation, a special issue of Feminist Media Histories (forthcoming, October 2025) dedicated to contemporary feminist historical methods and metahistorical concerns.

My second monograph, tentatively titled Unindexical: Historicity and Mourning in the Twenty-First Century, examines the nature of the relationship between contemporary images and history. I am interested in how contemporary media function as historical artifacts—how they encourage us to mourn, experience nostalgia, or encounter the specters of past time—despite their seeming lack of artifactual authority. In 2021, I was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Experienced Researcher Fellowship to conduct the first stage of research as a fellow at the Institute für Medienwissenschaft at the Humboldt-Universität (Berlin). I was awarded a second round of funding to continue this research in 2024.

Books & Edited Collections:

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

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

Articles & Book Chapters:

“Body Parts: Feeling Labor in Early Film Color,” in Incomplete: The Feminist Possibilities of Unfinished Film, ed. Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023). 2025 Best Edited Collection Award, Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

“Weird Loops: Climate Change, Drone Cinema, and the Work of Mourning,” in Cinema of Exploration: Essays on an Adventurous Film Practice, ed. James Leo Cahill and Luca Caminati (Routledge/AFI, 2020), 73–90.

“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).

Forthcoming & In-Progress Projects

Unindexical: Historicity and Mourning in the Twenty-First Century (manuscript in progress), supported by the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung Experienced Researcher Fellowship, 2021–2022, 2024–2025.

“Maximizing Our Losses: Anna Ridler and the Ruins of AI,” (forthcoming, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, October 2025).

Editor, Special Issue of Feminist Media Histories, “On Methods, or Try Not to Lose So Much,” (forthcoming, University of California Press, October 2025).

“Film History’s Pragmatism,” Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics (forthcoming, December 2025).

“Operator Labor: Feminism’s Cruel Optimism and the Powers of Anonymous Control” (in progress)

Revision and French translation of the Introduction to Bad Film Histories, “Untimely Historiographies, Ethnographic Particularities,” in Cinéma et Anthropologie, ed. Jonathan Larcher and Damien Mottier (forthcoming Presses Universitaires de France).