Film and Visual Studies Colloquium: Despina Kakoudaki

The Film and Visual Studies Colloquium is pleased to present a talk by

Despina Kakoudaki
"The Mechanical Slave: Robot Stories and the Historical Legacies of Slavery"

Despina Kakoudaki is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature and Director of the Humanities Lab at American University, where she teaches interdisciplinary courses in literature and film, visual culture, and the history of technology and new media. She has published articles on robots and cyborgs, race and melodrama in action and disaster films, body transformation and technology in early cinema, the political role of the pin-up in World War II, and the representation of the archive in postmodern fiction. She has co-edited a collection of essays on the work of Pedro Almodovar with Brad Epps (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Her most recent book is Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People (Rutgers University Press in 2014).