Maggie Hennefeld is McKnight Presidential Fellow and associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. She is author of the award-winning Specters of Slapstick and Silent Film Comediennes (Columbia University Press, 2018), and co-editor of Cultural Critique and of two volumes, Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019) and Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Duke University Press, 2020).
CONTRIBUTOR ARTICLES
The Juridical Is Libidinal: From the First Amendment to “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”
As Maggie Hennefeld explains, Sacha Baron Cohen’s satire takes scatological aim at the American body politic at its most abject....
Cinema’s First Epidemic: From Contagious Twitching to Convulsive Laughter
Maggie Hennefeld explores epidemics in early slapstick: as subject, as context, and as commodity....
Looking for Léontine: My Obsession with a Forgotten Screen Queen
Professor and programmer Maggie Hennefeld explores the world of forgotten silent film actresses and archivists’ struggles to rediscover lost film art....
Confronting the Unwatchable
Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Baer on our unwatchable era....
