Katarzyna Marciniak

Professor of Global and Transnational Media Katarzyna Marciniak inaugurated her career at Oxy during the 2019-20 academic year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor. Prior to that she was a Professor of Transnational Studies at Ohio University. Educated at the University of Łódź, Poland, the University of Montana, and the University of Oregon, Dr. M, as her students call her, is trained in critical theory and film studies. In her work, she focuses on the aesthetics and politics of transnational visual cultures, particularly on representations of foreignness, immigration, national (un)belonging, and the construction of border zones as sites of contention. Her second specialization involves postsocialist media studies in relation to Eastern European cultures. When she started her career, the fields of transnational cinema and postsocialist media barely existed as recognizable areas of study in the Humanities. She calls it a privilege to be able to contribute her creative energies and vision to both fields, and, outside the U.S., she has been honored to receive international invitations to offer keynotes in Estonia, Germany, Italy, and the UK.

She has authored two monographs, and co-edited five books, most recently The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (Oxford University Press). Theorizing the ethics of teaching trauma cinema, her article Pedagogy of Anxiety, which was published in Signs, won the MLA Florence Howe Award for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship in 2010. The same year, the critical attention her work had received prompted Palgrave to appoint her the Lead Editor of their new book series, Global Cinema, which has published 21 volumes to date. She is currently at work on a new monograph, Fugitive Aesthetics: Journeys and Encounters in Refugee Cinema, co-written with her longtime collaborator Bruce Bennett (Lancaster University, UK). She taught at Oxy during the 2019-20 academic year as a Distinguished Visiting Professor.