Karen Beckman is the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Associate Professor of Film Studies in the department of the History of Art, and she is also the director of the program in Cinema Studies. She completed her BA in English at Cambridge University and her Ph.D in English at Princeton University. Her book, Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism (Duke UP, 2003), examines the relationship between the elusive female body and the medium of film. She is currently completing a book about car crashes and film that includes chapters on early cinema, slapstick comedy, educational safety films, Warhol, and contemporary disaster films (forthcoming, Duke UP). She is co-editor of two volumes: Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography with Jean Ma (Duke UP, September 2008) and Picture This! Photography and Literature with Liliane Weissberg (forthcoming). She has published articles on a range of subjects, including feminism and terrorism, death penalty photography, pop art and literature, and the relationship between cinema and contemporary art. She is also one of the editors of the journal Grey Room.

Other Affiliations:

She is a member of graduate groups in the departments of German and English, and is an affiliated faculty member of Women's Studies & the Alice Paul Center for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the LGBT center.

> Listen to archived recording of Karen Beckman's interview with filmmaker Werner Herzog at Slought Foundation, Thursday, October 25, 2007.