Kareem Estefan and Xin Peng will be joining the Centre for Film and Screen in September 2022 and will also both make History of Art their departmental home. These appointments result from and respond to the growth of postgraduate study in Film and Screen Studies at Cambridge over the past several years. Kareem’s and Xin’s research and teaching will broaden the scope of the Centre’s expertise while enhancing its existing strengths and contributing to work across the School of Arts and Humanities to expand the study of the moving image in a global context. We look forward to welcoming them here soon!
Kareem Estefan specialises in Arab cinema and visual culture, experimental documentary media practices, and activist engagements with archives and histories of colonialism in contemporary art and film. He recently completed his PhD at Brown University, writing a dissertation on decolonial practices of witnessing and worldbuilding in Palestinian moving-image media, with support from a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship and a Darat al-Funun Dissertation Fellowship.
Kareem’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in various publications, including: 4 Columns, Art in America, Feminist Media Histories, Frieze, Ibraaz, Journal of Palestine Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, Third Text, and World Records. He is co-editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017), an anthology of essays on artists’ activism, cultural boycotts, and transnational solidarities. He is also co-chair of the Middle East Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS).
Xin Peng is a Society of Scholars fellow at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities and a Ph. D. candidate in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle.
She is completing her dissertation, “Yellow Face, White Screen: Ornamentalizing Media Technologies in American Cinema, 1901-1949.” Excerpts of this dissertation won the 2020 Transnational Cinemas Scholarly Interest Group Graduate Essay Award at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the 2021 Nancy C.M. Hartsock Prize for Best Graduate Paper in Feminist Theory at the University of Washington. Her work and reviews appear or are forthcoming in Screen, Camera Obscura, the Women Film Pioneers Project, New Review of Film and Television Studies, ASAP/J, and Technology and Culture.