Overview
Patty Keller specializes in Spanish literature and visual culture. She is the author of Ghostly Landscapes: Film, Photography, and the Aesthetics of Haunting in Contemporary Spanish Culture, which examines the relationship between image production, ideology, and spectrality. Weaving together close readings of three distinct media from Spain’s fascist and post-fascist periods—documentary newsreels, art films, and conceptual photography—this study explores the interpretive possibilities of visual constructions of loss in contemporary culture. She is currently working on a new project titled Photography’s Wound: Exposing Belief in Times of Uncertainty, a study of contemporary photography, ethics, and structures of belief. Her research and teaching interests are located at the intersection of literature, photography, poetics, critical theory, political philosophy, cultural studies, cinema and media studies. She teaches with the Cornell Prison Education Program.
RECENT COURSES
- Spanish Photography
- FWS: Writing on Ruins
- Beauty / Grief
- Perspectives on Spain
- The Uncanny
- Modern Spanish Literature
- Ruined Landscapes
- Deceleration
- Melodrama & Cinema
- Cinematic Cities
- Modern Spanish Literature
- Perspectives on Spain
- Lorca's Poetics
- Architectures of Desire: Luis Buñuel & Film Theory
- Todo Almodóvar
Research Focus
- 19th – 21st Century Visual Culture
- Intersections of Film, Photography & Literature
- Modern & Contemporary Spain
- Fascism
- Literary Theory
- Critical Theory
- Landscape Theory
- Galician Studies
- Experimental Cinema
- Photography as Text
Publications
Selected Articles
"Fixing Solitude" Romanic Review. Special Issue: Solitudes. Ed. Cary Howie. Vol. 114: 1 (May 2023): 103–124. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00358118-10357367
“Surface Tension and Utopian Underworlds: Orpheus and the Executioner in Luis Berlanga's El verdugo (1963).” Architecture and the Urban in Spanish Film. Ed. Susan Larson (Intellect Books, 2022).
“There's a stutter in the archive." Diacritics Unarchive Series. Ed. Marc Kohlbry. No. 7 (November 2021): online.
“Las muertes de la imagen: errancia, entropía y proyecciones de luz” (translated by Félix Zamora Gómez ). Envejecimientos y cines ibéricos. Eds. Raquel Medina, Cristina Moreiras-Menor, María Pilar Rodríguez and Barbara Zecchi. Tirant lo Blanch, 2021. English version
“Capturing Death: Photography, Performance, and Bearing Witness.” Rite, Flesh, and Stone: The Matter of Death in Contemporary Spanish Culture. Eds. Antonio Córdoba and Daniel García-Donoso. Vanderbilt University Press, 2021.
“Lois Patiño’s Landscapes: Aura, Loss, Duration.” ABRIU: Estudos de textualidade do Brasil, Galicia e Portugal. Special Issue “Glocal Galicia: Redefining Galician Culture in the Global Age.” Ed. José Colmeiro. Vol. 7 (2018): 101-124.
“Buñuel’s Phantoms.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Vol. 52.2 (June 2018): 351-374.
“From Afterlife to Afterimage: History Happens With Photography.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. Vol. 20 (2016): 49-74.