糖心TV

About

Karl Schoonover holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Schoonover has written widely on topics including film theory, queer and trans cinema, the representation of toxic waste, and the politics of non-western cinemas. With Rosalind Galt, Schoonover was awarded the Katherine Singer Kov谩cs award for outstanding monograph in film and media studies by the Society of Film and Media Studies. Schoonover has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies and Film Criticism, as well as on the advisory board of Routledge's Remapping World Cinema book series and co-founded a scholarly caucus for art historians and visual culture researchers within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies called CinemArts. Schoonover's work has been translated and published in French, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese.

Research interests

My research explores the relationship of cinema aesthetics to political change. I am also interested in the history of film theory, particularly its engagement with questions of realism, temporality, excess, and queerness.

My first book Brutal Vision: The Neorealist Body in Postwar Italian Cinema explores how Neorealist films used images of suffering to reconstitute the idea of the human, to recalibrate the scale of human community, and to endorse a foreign spectator as a necessary moral onlooker. The 鈥榖rutal humanism鈥� of these films, I argue, provided an affective bolster to the socio-economic bonds of the North Atlantic community and to a new culture of transnational humanitarian aid that threatened national sovereignty. With Rosalind Galt, I edited the book Global Art Cinema, an anthology that examines art cinema鈥檚 persistence as a category in the era of globalisation. My collaboration with Galt continues with a monograph that we wrote together, Queer Cinema in the World (Duke University Press, 2016). This book proposes that queer cinema makes the world anew. It examines both how overtly queer film practices world themselves and how world cinema so often turns to the queer as a means of establishing a global scale. In both cases, our analysis demonstrates how queerness allows the world to be visible, known, and palpable. By exploring where queer cinema can be found in the world, we ask what institutional spaces nourish or enable queer film cultures, circulation, and reception and what spaces foreclose on it. From Chinese lesbian romance to Swedish genderqueer documentary, and from Bangladeshi melodrama to Brazilian art film, it demands a radically revised account of cinema鈥檚 queer globalism.

My new book project looks at cinema as a medium defined by its relationship to waste. The book examines how films turn to trash as a means of refashioning the broader politics of cultural production and value.

A co-investigator on the AHRC Major Research Project '' (2016-2019), Schoonover was also a co-investigator on the AHRC-funded 'Global Queer Cinema' project (2011-2013).

Selected Publications

Books

Articles

• 'Sinkholes, GIFs, and Cinematic Ecocatastrophe', Deep Meditations, edited by Karen Redrobe and Jeff Scheible, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2021): 201-215.

• a catalogue essay for an exhibition of Keven Gaffney at the Crawford Art Gallery, Cork, Ireland (August 2020).
• '[a conversation with Barbara Corsi]' Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 40.1 (2020): 129-139.
• '' (co-written with Rosalind Galt) Italian Culture, 37.1 (2019): 64-81.
• Journal of Cinema and Media Studies [formerly Cinema Journal] 58.2 (2019): 169-174.
• '' Discourse: Journal for theoretical studies in media and culture, 40.3 (Fall 2018): 342-357.
•  differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 29.1 (2018): 33-65.
• 'When Cinema Was Humanism' in World Cinemas, Global Networks, eds. Elena Gorfinkel and Tami Williams, Rutgers University Press (2018): 117-140.
• 'Gli sguardi del dopoguerra: il neorealismo e i suoi altri' in Intorno al Neorealismo, eds. Maria Paola Pierini, Giulia Carluccio, and Emiliano Morreale, Milan: Scalpendi (2017): 57-66.
• 'Provincializing Heterosexuality: queer style, world cinema' (co-written with Rosalind Galt) in The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, eds. Rob Stone et al. Routledge (2017): 347-358.
• 'Scrap Metal, Stains, Clogged Drains: Argento鈥檚 Refuse and Its Refusals' in Italian Horror Cinema, eds. Stefano Baschiera and Russ Hunter, Edinburgh University Press (2016): 111-125.
• 'Hypotheses on the Queer Middlebrow' (co-written with Rosalind Galt) in Middlebrow Cinema, ed. Sally Faulkner. Routledge (2016):196-211.
• '' (co-written with Rosalind Galt), translated into Portuguese, ArtCultura 17.30 (January – June, 2015): 97-107.
• '' Screen 56.1 (Spring 2015): 121-132.
• 鈥樷�� Cinema Journal 53.2 (Winter 2014): 93-116.
• 鈥樷�� NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies No. 4 (Autumn 2013).
• 鈥樷�� Framework 53.1 (Spring 2012): 65-78.
  — reprinted in Slow Cinema, ed. Tiago de Luca and Nuno Barradas Jorge, Edinburgh University Press, 2016.
• 鈥樷�� World Picture 6 (Winter 2011).
• 鈥楢ntonioni鈥檚 Waste Management鈥� in Antonioni: Centenary Essays. Ed. John David Rhodes and Laura Rascaroli. Palgrave/British Film Institute. (2011): 235-253.
• 鈥楾he Impurity of Art Cinema鈥� (co-written with Rosalind Galt) in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories Oxford University Press. (2010): 3-27.
• 鈥楧ivine: Towards an 鈥淚mperfect鈥� Stardom鈥� in Hollywood Reborn: Movie Stars of the 1970s. Ed. James Morrison. Rutgers UP (2010): 158-181.
• 鈥楾he Comfort of Carnage: Realism and America鈥檚 World Understanding鈥� in Convergence Media History. Ed. Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake. Routledge Press (2009): 127-138.
• 鈥楴eorealism at a Distance鈥� in European Film Theory. Ed. Temenuga Trifonova. Routledge Press, AFI Film Readers Series (2008): 301-318.
• 鈥樷�� Art Journal. 62.2 (Fall 2003): 30-41.

Interviews

• '' SCMS, 17 March 2018.
• '' by Mirko Lino, Pulp Corn, 28 Maggio 2017.
• '' by Regina Longo in Film Quarterly Volume 70, Number 2 (Winter 2016).
• '' June 16, 2016.
• ''

Teaching and supervision

I have supervised PhDs on film theory, film aesthetics, world cinema, queer television, African cinema, Italian film history, and experimental European cinema of the mid-twentieth century. I am especially interested in supervising postgraduate projects related to film theory, the politics of world cinemas, contemporary moving-image aesthetics, and queer and trans cinema.

PhD Students

Current
Aaron Jagger (current) Visible Queer Trans Men in the Archive of Moving Image Representations: From AIDS to the Transgender Tipping Point and Beyond

Jacopo Francesco Mascoli (current) The Working Class Goes to Hell: Visions of Labour in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Daniel Zacariotti (current) Against God, Fatherland, and Family: Queer Sublation in Brazilian Cinema under Fascism

PhDs Supervised and Co-Supervised to completion
Morton, Emma (2025) Women and the Nation in Early Italian Cinema, 1905-1914. University of 糖心TV.

Puliti, Ilaria (2024) University of 糖心TV.

Yakovlev, Misha (2024) , University of 糖心TV.

Dhillon, Richard (2023) University of 糖心TV.

Capitano, Rossana (2022) University of 糖心TV.

Edwards, Jake (2021) University of 糖心TV.

Zhao, Jing (2020) University of 糖心TV.

Ryan, Connor (2015) Lagos Never Spoils: The Aesthetics, Affect, and Politics of the City in Nigerian Screen Media. Michigan State University.

Hamblin, Sarah (2012) Screening the Impossible: The Politics of Form and Feeling in Second Wave Revolutionary Cinema. Michigan State University.

Capitanio, Adam (2012) The Electrical Transformation of the Public Sphere: Home Video, the Family, and the Limits of Privacy in the Digital Age. Michigan State University.

Administrative roles

• Director of Research

National roles and professional associations

I am a member of SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies), NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies), and the BFI (British Film Institute). I am a member of the . In 2008, I co-founded the scholarly interest group within SCMS, and served as its co-chair for several years. I serve on the editorial boards of the [Formerly Cinema Journal] and .