Anna Cooper

Dr. Anna Cooper’s research interests include classical and contemporary Hollywood, transnational/postcolonial/neocolonial cinemas, space/place/mobilities in film, and feminist film and media studies.

Her monograph, The American Abroad: The Imperial Gaze in Postwar Hollywood Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2022), explores how postwar Hollywood cinema adopted elements of British and French imperial visual culture, transforming them to suit a new United Statesian context. Cooper argues that four visual discourses in particular–the sublime, the ethnographic, the picturesque, and glamour–became building blocks in the development of a new American visual language. Drawing on cinema and media studies, art history, American studies, and postcolonial studies, this innovative book offers a fresh way of thinking about Hollywood film aesthetics. It explores how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western colonial formations of vision influenced classical Hollywood film style.

Dr. Cooper has co-edited an anthology, Projecting the World: Representing the “Foreign” in Classical Hollywood, which collects current research on representations of foreign and international space in classical Hollywood cinema (Wayne State University Press, 2017).

Her latest project is on cinema and the cultures of neoliberalism. She is a co-Principal Investigator of "Neoliberalism at the Neopopulist Crossroads," a Sawyer Seminar funded by the Mellon Foundation (2020-22).

She also served as guest editor for a special issue of the New Review of Film and Television Studies, published in July 2019, on neoliberalism and cinema. Her contribution to the issue, an article-length introduction titled “Neoliberal Theory and Film Studies,” argues for more robust connections between these two fields given how often media and communications have been theorized as a powerful site for the dissemination of neoliberal modes of discipline.

From 2019 to 2022, Dr. Cooper was Co-Chair of the Classical Hollywood scholarly interest group in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Other publications:

• A New Feminist Critique of Film Canon: Moving Beyond the Diversity/Inclusion Paradigm in the Digital Era.”  Quarterly Review of Film and Video 36:5 (July 2019), 392-413.
• “Spaces of Failure: The Gendering of Neoliberal Mobilities in the U.S. Indie Road Movie,” in Journeys on Screen: Theory, Ethics and Aesthetics, edited by Louis Bayman and Natália Pinazza. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. 
• "Colonizing Europe: Widescreen Aesthetics in the 1950s’ American Travel Film,” Transnational Cinemas 7:1 (2016), 21-33.
• “America’s Representative Men: Moral Perfectionism, Masculinity and Psychoanalysis in Good Will Hunting,” Film-Philosophy 19 (2015), 270-288.

Courses taught:

• Global Queer Cinema
• Global Women Filmmakers
• Theory and Representation in Film and Television
• Deep-Dive Senior Projects in Film and Television Studies
• Film and Television History, Beginnings to Mid-20th Century
• Colonial/Postcolonial Cinema
• Race, Class, and Gender in Film and Television
• The Road Movie
• International Film and Television Business
• Costume and Cinema
• Chick Flicks
• Film and Television History, Mid-20th Century to the Present