杏吧原创

Biography

Laura Horak is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at 杏吧原创 University and director of the听Transgender Media Lab听补苍诲听. She investigates the history of transgender and queer film and media in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. She is author of听听(Rutgers UP, 2016) and co-editor of听(Indiana UP, 2014),听(Rutgers UP, 2019), and a special issue of听Somatechnics听辞苍听. Horak is a white cis queer settler scholar who is here to leverage her privilege and institutional resources for the revolution.

Cross-appointments and affiliations:听Pauline Jewett Institute for Women鈥檚 and Gender Studies;听Communication and Media Studies;听Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture;听Collaborative Specialization in Digital Humanities;听Sexuality Studies.

Horak investigates how cinema has helped envision new forms of gender and sexuality, from the early twentieth century to today. With colleagues in the United States and Europe, she is establishing a new field at the intersection of transgender studies and cinema and media studies. Founder of the Transgender Media Lab, she is creating novel digital tools to connect scholarly work with marginalized communities and is bringing forgotten films to the public through international festivals, DVD releases, and streaming platforms.

Horak works in transgender studies, a discipline that centres the lived experiences and theories of transgender, Two-Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and other gender-nonconforming people. With frequent collaborators C谩el M. Keegan and Eliza Steinbock (based in the US and the Netherlands, respectively), Horak is helping to establish a new subfield: trans cinema and media studies. Horak, Keegan, and Steinbock edited a special issue of听Somatechnics听on 鈥渢rans/cinematic/bodies鈥� and Horak and Keegan are currently co-editing a section on 鈥淭ransing Cinema and Media Studies鈥� for the听Journal of Cinema and Media Studies.

Horak publishes regularly on trans filmmaking practices.听Her article, 鈥溾�� (2014), in听Transgender Studies Quarterly, has been cited in scholarship from a range of disciplines, in English, German, Swedish, Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese. She argues that trans YouTube videos succeed because their formal strategies exploit the platform鈥檚 penchant for the personal and the spectacular. Based on her archival research in Toronto, Victoria, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Horak has published on听听and the political, cultural, and aesthetic work of the world鈥檚 first trans film festivals. She is currently writing the first book analyzing trans filmmaking in North America from the 1990s to today,听Trans Cinema: An Introduction. She is bringing attention to the works of trans filmmakers in Canadian film heritage as a collaborator on Janine Marchessault鈥檚 SSHRC Partnership Grant听听and as an associate member of Susan Lord鈥檚 CFI-funded听.

Horak is also building the field of trans cinema and media studies through a series of federally and provincially funded grants 鈥� a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2017-2019), a SSHRC Insight Grant (2020-2025), and an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2019-2024). With this support, she has founded the听Transgender Media Lab, a virtual and physical space for students and scholars working at the intersections of trans studies and media studies. The lab is planning to host a 鈥淪tate of Trans Cinema and Media Studies鈥� conference in 2023, the first of its kind. The lab has been running regular public events for sharing its research and building connections with the broader trans arts community. This includes public screenings at Digital Arts Resource Centre in Ottawa, a virtual watch party for Translations: Seattle Transgender Film Festival, and partnering with the Aesthetica Film Festival and Seattle Queer Film Festival on trans programming.

Working from the framework of intersectional feminist digital humanities, Horak is creating new digital tools to connect her scholarship with diverse trans communities. A key project of the Transgender Media Lab is the听, a collaborative online database and website that combines features of IMDb and Wikipedia to highlight innovative work of trans filmmakers over the past half-century. As of January 2021, the database contains more than 1,500 records and the website has been visited more than 8,400 times by 6,500 unique users from 117 countries. The portal enables new ways of analyzing trans film production and distribution and shares information with educators, students, festival programmers, artists, activists, and the public. It engages trans arts communities and the public to collaboratively generate new knowledge about trans films. Horak completed a pilot proof-of-concept and ran a听听in February 2020. She hopes to launch the public version of the database in Fall 2023, followed by a series of trainings and edit-a-thons at transgender and queer film festivals around North America.

In addition to her work on trans-made cinema, Horak explores feminist, queer, and trans lessons of early twentieth-century cinema in the United States and Sweden and brings long-forgotten silent films to international publics. Horak鈥檚 monograph,听, uses archival research to overturn long-standing assumptions about gender and sexuality in American film history, and reveals the fascination of early audiences with varied forms of female masculinity. Chosen by听Huffington Post听as one of the Best Film Books of 2016, it was also a 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a finalist for the 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award by the Theatre Library Association in the US, and was longlisted for the 2016 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book in the UK. Moreover, it has been cited in books and articles from a range of disciplines, in English, German, Swedish, Czech, and Spanish. Horak is currently writing a monograph titled听Cinema鈥檚 Oscar Wilde听(Rutgers UP) that demonstrates how cinema participated in the Swedish project of modernizing sexuality in the 1910s and 1920s via a case study of the gay, Jewish, Finnish-Swedish director Mauritz Stiller.

Horak brings the听results of her research to the public by programming feminist, queer, and trans silent films at film听festivals in Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Through a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2020-2023) titled听, she is embarking on an unprecedented collaboration with eleven film archives across Europe and North America,听,听, and the听, to make 98 silent films featuring cross-dressing women and women comedians publicly available for the first time.

Horak鈥檚 research demonstrates the key role of cinema in shaping the possibilities of gender and sexuality in our lives. Her scholarship is defined by international and interdisciplinary collaborations and, like cinema itself, her work brings people together across disciplines, national boundaries, and the academia/public divide to consider anew how media can reveal unexpected possibilities for more liberating ways of living our identities.

Selected publications

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鈥淩epresenting Ourselves into Existence: The Cultural, Political, and Aesthetic Work of Transgender Film Festivals in the 1990s鈥� In听The Oxford Companion to Queer Cinema, edited by Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo. Oxford: Oxford University Press. In production, anticipated 2021.

鈥�#WeAreTheGlobalCluster: Affectivity, Resistance, and听Sense8听Fandom,鈥� co-written with Rox Samer. In听Sense8: Transcending Television, edited by Deborah Shaw and Rob Stone. London: Bloomsbury Press. In production, anticipated 2021.

鈥溾�榃e鈥檇 like to see trans people at the very top鈥�: In Conversation with Transgender Talent Founder Ann Thomas.鈥澨�Feminist Media Histories. In production, anticipated Winter 2021.

听Transgender Studies Quarterly听7, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 274-287.

听In听The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilizing Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-Racist Media Cultures, edited by Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyr枚l盲 and Ingrid Ryberg, 95-115. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 21 pp. (open access)

听Special issue on听.听Feminist Media Histories听4, no. 2 (April 2018): 201-206. 5pp.

.听Somatechnics听8, no. 1 (March 2018). Co-edited with C谩el M. Keegan and Eliza Steinbock. 142 pp.

听Introduction to special issue on Cinematic Bodies.听Somatechnics听8, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 1鈥�13. Co-written with C谩el M. Keegan and Eliza Steinbock. 14pp.

听In听A Companion to D.W. Griffith, edited by Charlie Keil, 284鈥�308. Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. 25pp.

听Special issue on Transgender Media.听Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism37, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 9-20. 11 pp.

听Co-written with Roxanne Samer. With Moya Bailey, micha c谩rdenas, Lokeilani Kaimana, C谩el M. Keegan, Geneveive Newman, Roxanne Samer, and Raffi Sarkissian. Special issue on Transgender Media.听Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism听37, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 74-88.

听with Maggie Hennefeld.听Ms. Magazine Blog. October 25, 2017.

听European Journal of Scandinavian Studies听47, no. 2 (2017): 377-397. 21pp.

听In听The Arclight Guide to Media History and the Digital Humanities, edited by Charles Acland and Eric Hoyt, 65-102. Falmer: REFRAME/Project Arclight (2016). 38 pp.

听Special issue on Trans Cultural Production.听TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly听1, no. 4 (December 2014): 572-585. 14 pp.

听Journal of Scandinavian Cinema听4, no. 3 (September 2014): 193-208. 16 pp.

.听Co-edited with Jennifer Bean and Anupama Kapse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 360 pp.

听Camera Obscura听25, no. 2 74 (2010): 75-117. 42 pp.