Dr. Stephen Woo

Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies

Bio

Dr. Woo is a professor and scholar of global cinema and film theory. He received his PhD from the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and he was a 2024-2025 Helena Rubinstein Fellow in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is currently writing a book project on the relation between trauma, violence, and form across global cinema and media.


Education

PhD, Modern Culture and Media, Brown University, 2025
BA, Film Studies, Cornell University, 2014


Research Interests / Areas of Focus

Film theory, global cinema, psychoanalysis, trauma studies, decolonial and critical race theory, forensic media, theories of time and history


Selected Publications

"Framing Carceral and Cinematic Time." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 40.3 (119).

"The Universal Object of Memoria." New Literary History special issue on universalisms. Forthcoming.

"The Gaze of Cinema in the Space of Film Installation." 2025 Critical Studies Publication of the Independent Study Program, The Whitney Museum of American Art.

"Re-Documenting the US Invasion of Panamá Amidst the Contact Zone in Diciembres." Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 62.4.


Selected Presentations

"Communal Contradictions of Return and Repair." Visible Evidence XXXI Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 2025.

"Rereading the Time and Frame of Anxiety in Caché." LACK Conference V, Otterbein University, 2025.

"Formal Reading Across Media Fast and Slow." Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy, Berlin, Germany, 2024.

"In the Heat of the Sun and the Missed Quilting Point of Chinese History." Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Boston, MA, 2024.

"Modeling the Counter/Forensic Gaze." World Picture Conference, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin, Germany, 2024.

"What is the Counter/Forensic Gaze?" Visible Evidence XXIX Conference, Udine, Italy, 2023.

"The Impossible Object of Memoria." Troubling Universalisms Symposium, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2023.


Awards and Honors

Helena Rubinstein Fellowship in Critical Studies, Independent Study Program, The Whitney Museum of American Art, 2024-2025

Collaborative Humanities Fellowship, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University, 2022-2023

Student Writing Award, First Place, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2022

Albert Spaulding Cook Prize, Brown University Department of Comparative Literature, 2021

Image of Stephen Woo.

Contact Information

Academic School

School of Communication and the Arts

Office

Lowell Thomas

Email

stephen.woo@Marist.edu

Phone

(845) 575-3000, ext. 2661