About

Karl Schoonover holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. He has written widely on topics including film theory, queer cinema, the representation of toxic waste, non-western cinemas, and many aspects of Italian cinema. His most recent book was awarded the Katherine Singer Kovács award for outstanding monograph in film and media studies by the Society of Film and Media Studies. He serves on the editorial boards of the journals the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal) and Film Criticism. He is an advisory board member for Routledge's Remapping World Cinema book series and co-founded a scholarly caucus for art historians and visual culture researchers within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies called CinemArts. His work has been translated and published in French, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese.

He was co-investigator on the AHRC Major Research Project 'Producers and Production Practice in the History of Italian Cinema, 1949-1975' (2016-2019). He was co-investigator on the AHRC-funded 'Global Queer Cinema' project (2011-2013).

Research interests

My research explores the relationship of cinema aesthetics to political change. I am also interested in the history of film theory, particularly its engagement with questions of realism, temporality, excess, and queerness.

My first book Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema explores how Neorealist films used images of suffering to reconstitute the idea of the human, to recalibrate the scale of human community, and to endorse a foreign spectator as a necessary moral onlooker. The ‘brutal humanism’ of these films, I argue, provided an affective bolster to the socio-economic bonds of the North Atlantic community and to a new culture of transnational humanitarian aid that threatened national sovereignty. With Rosalind Galt, I edited the book Global Art Cinema, an anthology that examines art cinema’s persistence as a category in the era of globalisation. My collaboration with Galt continues with a monograph that we wrote together, Queer Cinema in the World (Duke University Press, 2016). This book proposes that queer cinema makes the world anew. It examines both how overtly queer film practices world themselves and how world cinema so often turns to the queer as a means of establishing a global scale. In both cases, our analysis demonstrates how queerness allows the world to be visible, known, and palpable. By exploring where queer cinema can be found in the world, we ask what institutional spaces nourish or enable queer film cultures, circulation, and reception and what spaces foreclose on it. From Chinese lesbian romance to Swedish genderqueer documentary, and from Bangladeshi melodrama to Brazilian art film, it demands a radically revised account of cinema’s queer globalism.

My new book project looks at cinema as a medium defined by its relationship to waste. The book examines how films turn to trash as a means of refashioning the broader politics of cultural production and value.

Selected Publications

Books

Articles

• 'Sinkholes, GIFs, and Cinematic Ecocatastrophe', Deep Meditations, edited by Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2021): 201-215.

• 'Summoning a Queer State' a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Keven Gaffney at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland (August 2020).
• 'Primed Real Estate: Film Producers and Land Development [a conversation with Barbara Corsi]' Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 40.1 (2020): 129-139.
• 'Untimely Desires, Historical Efflorescence, and Italy in Call Me by Your Name' (co-written with Rosalind Galt) Italian Culture, 37.1 (2019): 64-81.
• 'Sinkholes' Journal of Cinema and Media Studies [formerly Cinema Journal] 58.2 (2019): 169-174.
• 'What do we do with vacant space in horror films?' Discourse: Journal for theoretical studies in media and culture, 40.3 (Fall 2018): 342-357.
• 'The Cinema of Disposal: Max Ophuls and Accumulation in America' differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 29.1 (2018): 33-65.
• 'When Cinema Was Humanism' in World Cinemas, Global Networks, eds. Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, Rutgers University Press (2018): 117-140.
• 'Gli sguardi del dopoguerra: il neorealismo e i suoi altri' in Intorno al Neorealismo, eds. Maria Paola Pierini, Giulia Carluccio, and Emiliano Morreale, Milan: Scalpendi (2017): 57-66.
• 'Provincializing Heterosexuality: queer style, world cinema' (co-written with Rosalind Galt) in The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, eds. Rob Stone et al. Routledge (2017): 347-358.
• 'Scrap Metal, Stains, Clogged Drains: Argento’s Refuse and Its Refusals' in Italian Horror Cinema, eds. Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter, Edinburgh University Press (2016): 111-125.
• 'Hypotheses on the Queer Middlebrow' (co-written with Rosalind Galt) in Middlebrow Cinema, ed. Sally Faulkner. Routledge (2016):196-211.
• 'Os mundos do cinema queer: da estética ao ativismo [The worlds of queer cinema: from aesthetics to activism]Link opens in a new window' (co-written with Rosalind Galt), translated into Portuguese, ArtCultura 17.30 (January – June, 2015): 97-107.
• 'Queer or Human?: Film Festivals, Human Rights and Global Film Culture' Screen 56.1 (Spring 2015): 121-132.
• ‘Histrionic Gestures and Historical Representation: Masina’s Cabiria, Bazin’s Chaplin, and Fellini’s Neorealism’ Cinema Journal 53.2 (Winter 2014): 93-116.
• ‘Documentaries without Documents: Ecocinema and Toxins’ NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies No. 4 (Autumn 2013).
• ‘Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema’s Laboring Body, the Political Spectator, and the Queer’ Framework 53.1 (Spring 2012): 65-78.
  — reprinted in Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
• ‘David Wojnarowicz’s Graven Image: Cinema, Censorship, and Queers’ World Picture 6 (Winter 2011).
• ‘Antonioni’s Waste Management’ in Antonioni: Centenary Essays. Ed. John David Rhodes and Laura Rascaroli. Palgrave/British Film Institute. (2011): 235-253.
• ‘The Impurity of Art Cinema’ (co-written with Rosalind Galt) in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories Oxford University Press. (2010): 3-27.
• ‘Divine: Towards an “Imperfect” Stardom’ in Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s. Ed. James Morrison. Rutgers UP (2010): 158-181.
• ‘The Comfort of Carnage: Realism and America’s World Understanding’ in Convergence Media History. Ed. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake. Routledge Press (2009): 127-138.
• ‘Neorealism at a Distance’ in European Film Theory. Ed. Temenuga Trifonova. Routledge Press, AFI Film Readers Series (2008): 301-318.
• ‘Ectoplasms, Evanescence, and Photography’ Art Journal. 62.2 (Fall 2003): 30-41.

Interviews

• 'Interview with SCMS 2018 The Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award Winners Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt' SCMS, 17 March 2018.
• 'Incontro con gli autori Karl Schoonover e Rosalind Galt' by Mirko Lino, Pulp Corn, 28 Maggio 2017.
• 'Queering the Globe: A Conversation with Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover on Queer Cinema in the World' by Regina Longo in Film Quarterly Volume 70, Number 2 (Winter 2016).
• 'Karl Schoonover and Rosalind Galt Talk about SiciliaQueer Film Festival' June 16, 2016.
• 'Rethinking Michelangelo Antonioni's modernism: A conversation between Karl Schoonover and John David Rhodes'

Teaching and supervision

I have supervised PhDs on film theory, film aesthetics, world cinema, queer television, African cinema, Italian film history, and experimental European cinema of the mid-twentieth century. I am especially interested in supervising postgraduate projects related to film theory, the politics of world cinemas, contemporary moving-image aesthetics, and queer and trans cinema.

Administrative roles

• Director of Graduate Studies

National roles and professional associations

I am a member of SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies), NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies), and the BFI (British Film Institute). I am a member of the Midlands Television Research Group. In 2008, I co-founded the scholarly interest group CinemArtsLink opens in a new window within SCMS, and served as its co-chair for several years. I serve on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies [Formerly Cinema Journal] and Film Criticism.