For more than a decade, Colleen Kennedy-Karpat (PhD French, Rutgers University, 2011) has taught film and media studies in the Department of Communication and Design at Bilkent University. Her teaching includes undergraduate and graduate courses in film and media studies as well as advising a range of film- and media-related MA theses and fourth-year capstone projects. Her own research focuses on media adaptations, national and transnational film cultures, nostalgia, genre, and stardom.
Dr. Kennedy-Karpat serves as Associate Editor of the journal Adaptation (Oxford University Press), where she also helmed a special issue on Adaptation and Nostalgia (issue 13.3; 2020). The issue’s introductory essay discusses the HBO series adaptation of the graphic novel Watchmen and the hauntological nostalgia of Disney’s live-action remakes. She also served on the organizing committee for the online conferences Gender and Sustainability: Agnès Varda’s Sustaining Legacy / “Virtual Varda” (2020) and Teaching Women’s Filmmaking (2021), both hosted by Istanbul Bilgi University.
Her publications cover a wide range of topics in film studies, including the co-edited collection The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda (Bloomsbury, 2022, with Feride Çiçekoglu), which builds on the 2020 “Virtual Varda” conference with an added section about Varda’s work in the classroom. Dr. Kennedy-Karpat’s previous volume, Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige (2017, co-edited with Eric Sandberg), explores the intersection of adaptation and discourses of prestige in the culture industries. Her award-winning monograph Rogues, Romance, and Exoticism in French Cinema of the 1930s (2013) discusses the cinéma colonial and other cross-cultural representations in popular, pre-WWII films. Additional publications include an essay in Camera Obscura and a book chapter — also translated into Turkish — on Agnès Varda; an article on Turkish comedy star Cem Yılmaz and genre parody (with M. Mert Örsler); as well as essays on stardom and performance in the biopic; on “sci-fidelity” in Hollywood blockbusters (with Shahrzad Seyfafjehi); on Bill Murray and Wes Anderson; on Marjane Satrapi and self-adaptation; on the miniseries Generation Kill (with Magdalena Yüksel); and other topics, particularly related to French cinema history.
She has also made video essays, including 99 Years in Brittany and the work-in-progress Genre/Nostalgia/Quintana.
Dr. Kennedy-Karpat is currently working on new projects focused on the films of Agnès Varda; a special dossier of Open Screens devoted to Teaching Women’s Filmmaking; a book chapter on literary adaptation in Turkish cinema (forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptation in the 21st Century); and nostalgia in transnational cinemas.