Dr Katherine Groo
Lecturer
Personal Details
| Telephone: | +44 (0)1224 272644 |
| E-mail: | k.groo@abdn.ac.uk |
| Personal website: | katherinegroo.wordpress.com |
| Address: | School of Language and Literature King's College University of Aberdeen Taylor Bldg. A Aberdeen AB24 3UB Scotland, UK |
Biography
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 2009
M.A., Comparative Literature, Cornell University, 2006
B.A., Comparative Literature and French, Emory University, 2002
Research Interests
Early and Silent-Era Cinemas; Experimental and “Minor” Film Practices; Orphan, Handmade, and Recycled Cinemas; Visual Ethnography; Film History, Historiography, and Archive Theory
Current Research
In my current book project, Bad Film Histories: Ethnography and the Early Archive, I explore the ways in which early ethnographic films produce meaning and what these unusual visual artifacts mean for early film history, historiography, and the archive.Ethnographic cinema overflows disciplinary taxonomies, crosses and combines genres, and constructs a potentially limitless catalogue of films that wander and waste time. Put simply: these films resist our efforts to write and recover early film history and, in so doing, pose a number of important questions to the recuperative historiographies that have shaped early film history for three decades. Bad Film Histories also challenges the prevailing critical approaches to early ethnographic cinema, which read this mode and moment of film production as either a seamless ideological extension of colonial force or an early film “attraction” among many others. In foregrounding the ellipses and excesses of ethnographic cinema, my research articulates an alternative archival site, as well as an alternative approach to early film history. Rather than filling holes, this work tries to theorize the emptiness.
Research Grants
2010: British Academy Research Grant2010: Carnegie Research Grant
2009: British Academy Overseas Conference Travel Grant
Teaching Responsibilities
Introduction to Film
Introduction to Visual Culture
Film History I: Cinema and Modernity
Film History II: Cinema and Revolution
Honors Seminar: Bodies on Screens
Honors Seminar: Global Silent Cinema
Honors Seminar: Amateurs, Orphans, and Queers: In Search of Minor Cinemas
Graduate Seminar: Debates in Visual Culture
Graduate Seminar: Film and Visual Art Theory
Graduate Seminar: Sound/Noise/Silence + Remix (Designed)
External Responsibilities
Archive News Editor, Cinema Journal
Recent Conference Papers and Presentations
February 2012 "Half/Films," Glasgow Short Film Festival, Center for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow
July 2011 “Bad (Film) Histories,” Screen Conference, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland
March 2011 “Half/Films: Ethnography and the Early Archive,” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, New Orleans, LA
December 2010 “The Maison and its Minor: Lumières, Film History, the Archive,” Film and Visual Culture Research Seminar, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland
July 2010 “Unkillable Something: Josephine Baker and the Cinema of Métissage,” Screen conference, Glasgow, Scotland
June 2010 “Native and Narration: Early Ethno-Fiction and its Mixed-Race Stars,” Women of the Silent Screen, Bologna, Italy
March 2010 “Other Times and Spaces, (or) How Cinema Unmakes Anthropology’s Object,” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Los Angeles, CA
April 2009 “Supplementing the Supplement: Ethnography and the Early Film Archive,” Invited Talk, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland
March 2009 “Representing Difference and Vibrating with the Infinite: Ontology and Totality in Les Archives de la Planète,” the American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Cambridge, MA
March 2008 “Early Ethnography as Image-Temps,” The Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Philadelphia, PA
December 2007 “Ciné Goes Abroad: La Maison Lumière, 1896-1903,” Visible Evidence XIV, Ruhr Universität, Bochum, Germany
October 2006 “Rereading the Surface of Ethnographic Cinema,” Thinking the Surface: a Workshop on Screens, Mobilities, and Environments in the Global Age, the Rose Goldsen Lecture Series, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY
Publications
- Groo, KE. Bad Film Histories, Book, 2014
- Groo, KE. & Flaig, P. Digital Anachronisms, Celluloid Specters, Book, 2014
- Groo, KE. Bab El-Oued City (Merzak Allouache, 1994), Entry for encyclopedia/dictionary, 2013, Encyclopedia of World Cinema
- Groo, KE. L'Atalante (Jean Vigo, 1934), Entry for encyclopedia/dictionary, 2013, Encyclopedia of World Cinema
- Groo, KE. La Roue (Abel Gance, 1923), Entry for encyclopedia/dictionary, 2013, Encyclopedia of World Cinema
- Groo, KE. Cut, Paste, Glitch, and Stutter, Article, 2012, Frames, 1, 1
- Groo, KE. Paula Amad, 'Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de la Planète', Book/Film/Article review, 2012, Film-Philosophy, 16, 1, pp263 - 269, ISSN/ISBN: 1466-4615
- Groo, KE. Shadow Lives, Article, 2012, Framework , ISSN/ISBN: 0306-7661
- Groo, KE. The Maison and Its Minor, Article, 2012, Cinema Journal, ISSN/ISBN: 0009-7101