Research Expertise and Interest

feminist theory, cultural theory, archaeology of media technology, film and modernity, film theory, psychoanalytic theory

Research Description

Professor Doane’s research has focused recently on the organization of time and space in cinema in relation to other discursive regimes such as philosophy, physics, geography, art history, physiognomy and psychoanalysis. This fall she completed a book manuscript, ‘Bigger Than Life’: The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema (forthcoming, Duke University Press, 2021), which addresses the way in which cinematic scale is strongly implicated in a more general reconfiguration of the subject’s relation to space, distance, location and scale in modernity and beyond.  Cinema’s deployment of differently scaled shots, its use of the scale model and especially the close-up, constitute a derangement of scale that upends classical notions of location and orientation.  She is also the author of The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (2002), Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (1991), The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (1987) and editor of a 2007 special issue of differences, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign.” Her fields of research and teaching include feminist film theory, sound in the cinema, psychoanalytic theory, media archaeology, television, and sexual and racial difference in film.  She has recently taught undergraduate courses in Media and Cultural Theory, Film Noir, Sound Cinema, Film and Modernity, and The Face in the Cinema.  At the graduate level, she has taught seminars such as The Idea of a Medium, Archaeologies of Projection, Film and Media Theory, Freud and Lacan, The Close-Up and Scale in the Cinema, and the Proseminar.  She is also a member of the Critical Theory faculty.  Future research includes a dissection of the concept of the “end” in discourses about the end of cinema, the end of the world and the end of the end in seriality.