Dr Sarah Cooper

Contact: sarah.cooper@kcl.ac.uk

Sarah Cooper is Reader in Film Studies. Her principal research interests are in film theory and continental philosophy; ethics and film, especially documentary; modern critical theory, especially feminist theory, queer theory, and psychoanalysis; and French cinema. She has written books on feminist and queer theory, post-war French documentary, and the films of Chris Marker. She has also edited a volume of articles on the ethical philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and cinema for the on-line journal Film-Philosophy. Currently, she is developing a book project on film and the soul.

Background

She was an undergraduate and a postgraduate student at Cambridge University, Corpus Christi College, where she completed a BA Honours Degree in Modern and Medieval Languages (French and German), an MPhil in European Literature, and a PhD thesis on French feminist theory and North American queer theory. She worked as a Staff Fellow and Newton Trust Lecturer in French Studies at Trinity Hall, Cambridge University from 1998-2004, before moving to King’s to lecture in Film Studies from 2004.

Selected Publications

Books

Chris Marker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) (204 pp.).

Selfless Cinema? Ethics and French Documentary (Oxford: Legenda, 2006) (102 pp.).

Relating to Queer Theory: Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig, and Cixous (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000) (231 pp.).

Edited Volume

‘The Occluded Relation: Levinas and Cinema’, Special Issue of Film-Philosophy, vol 11, no 2 (August 2007), http://www.film-philosophy.com (143 pp.).

Other Work

She is on the editorial board of the on-line journal Film-Philosophy.

Undergraduate and Graduate Areas of Teaching & Supervision

At BA and MA level she has contributed to team teaching various introductory courses, and has also taught undergraduate courses on Film Theory (a range from classical to contemporary theory); Documentary Film; Fathers in Film; Cinema and Spectatorship; and a postgraduate course, Thinking Cinema with Emmanuel Levinas: Theory, Philosophy, Ethics.

PhD topics supervised to date include: Ethics and French Documentaries of the Holocaust and the Occupation; The Ontology of Film from the Celluloid to the Digital Era; Female Masochism in Contemporary Western Cinema; Luce Irigaray’s Philosophy and the Films of David Cronenberg, Lars von Trier and Atom Egoyan; Luce Irigaray and Female Subjectivity; Exile, Displacement, Psychoanalysis and Cinema; Psychoanalysis (Wilfred Bion) and the Retreat in Cinema; Écriture féminine and the Films of Varda, Denis, and Breillat; Deleuze, Bergson, Affect, and Cinema; Lacan and Film Noir.