Karen Beckman

Director

Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of History of Art and Cinema Studies

Office:

209A Fisher-Bennett Hall & 209 Jaffe

Affiliation:

History of Art

Telephone:

Jaffe: 215.898.3250; Fisher-Bennett Hall: 215.746.3761

Email:

beckmank@sas.upenn.edu

Homepage:

http://www.arthistory.upenn.edu/faculty/beckman.htm

Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies in the department of the History of Art, and she is also the director of the program in Cinema Studies. She completed her BA in English at Cambridge University and her Ph.D in English at Princeton University. Her book, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Duke UP, 2003), examines the relationship between the elusive female body and the medium of film. She has recently completed a book about car crashes and film that includes chapters on early cinema, slapstick comedy, educational safety films, Warhol, and contemporary disaster films, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (forthcoming, Duke UP), and is now working on a new book about the relationship between animation and documentary film. She is co-editor of two volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke UP, September 2008) and Picture This! Photography and Literature with Liliane Weissberg. She has published articles on a range of subjects, including feminism and terrorism, death penalty photography, pop art and literature, and the relationship between cinema and contemporary art. She is also one of the senior editors of the journal Grey Room. Courses taught include: Introduction to Film Theory (CINE 103), Film Theory (ARTH 593), Cinema and Photography (ARTH 793; CINE 392), Race, Sex and Gender in Early Cinema (ARTH 793), Women and Film (CINE 208), FIlm History (CINE 101), The Road Movie (ARTH 291), and Issues in Contemporary Art and the Art of Curating. She is a member of graduate groups in the departments of German and English, and is an affiliated faculty member of Women's Studies, the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the LGBT center.