skip to content
 

Kareem Estefan

Estefan

Kareem Estefan is an Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Studies. His research centers on Arab moving-image practices, documentary and Global South cinema, and engagements with colonialism and decolonization in film and contemporary art. 

His writing on contemporary visual culture has appeared in both scholarly and general-audience publications, including 4 Columns, Art in America, Artforum, BOMB, Feminist Media Histories, Frieze, Ibraaz, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal of Visual Culture, The New Inquiry, The New York Times T Magazine, Third Text, and World Records. He is also co-editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017), an anthology of essays by artists, curators, and scholars on artists’ activism, boycott campaigns, (self-)censorship, and transnational solidarity.

Currently, Dr Estefan is working on a manuscript on practices of witnessing and worldbuilding in contemporary Palestinian moving-image works (Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Azza El-Hassan, Larissa Sansour). Based on his dissertation, this manuscript posits a model of witnessing as a decolonial process of worldbuilding and world repair in which artists and filmmakers refract the unjust conditions of the present and reconstruct unrealized political potential from the past to animate visions of emergent rights and resurgent communities. He completed his PhD in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, and previously earned an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing at SVA and a BA in Comparative Literature at NYU.

Dr Estefan welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students pursuing research relevant to his interests.

Christ’s College
St Andrew’s Street
Cambridge
CB2 3BU

Email: ke335@cam.ac.uk