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
- Deceleration
- Melodrama & Cinema
- Experimental Screens
- Lorca's Poetics
- Cinematic Cities
- Modern Spanish Literature
- Cinema / History / Violence
- Perspectives on Spain
- Architectures of Desire: Luis Buñuel & Film Theory
- Spanish Cinema 1950 – 1975
- 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
Select Articles
- “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.
- “Espera, Andalucía: la crisis, el tiempo de la espera y la fotografía de Markel Redondo.” La retórica del sur: Representaciones y discursos sobre Andalucía en el periodo democrático. Eds. Antonio Gómez L. Quiñones and José M. del Pino. Trans. Rodrigo Hasbún. Sevilla: Ediciones Alfar, 2015. (291-325) English version
- “Echoes of the World: Spectrality, Community and Sound in Recuerdos de una mañana.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Vol. 15.3 (2015): 299-321.
- “Letters From the City. Writing Boundaries in Nueve cartas a Berta (1965).” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. Vol. 90.8 (Fall 2013): 943-962.
- “Cinematic Time and the Question of Possibility in Carlos Saura’s Elisa, vida mía (1977).” Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. Vol. 10.1 (March 2013): 3-22.
- “The Valley, the Monument, and the Tomb. Notes on the Place of Historical Memory.” Memory & Its Discontents: Spanish Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century. Eds. Luis Martín Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini. Hispanic Issues On Line 11 (Fall 2012): 64-86.
- “Place & the Politics of Loss in Mercedes Alvarez’s El cielo gira (2004).” Hispanic Research Journal. Vol. 13.4 (August 2012): 361-81.
- “Joan Fontcuberta’s Landscapes—Remapping Photography and the Technological Image.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Vol. 12.2 (2011): 129-153.
- “Encounters with the Unsightly: Reading [AIDS] History, Photography, and the Obscene.” Co-authored with Jonathan Snyder. On Photography, History, and Memory in Spain. Ed. María Nilsson. Hispanic Issues On Line 3 (Spring 2011): 91-115.
