Claire Cooley
Affiliated Faculty, School of Film, Television, and Media Arts
Dr. Claire Cooley is an educator and scholar of film and media in and between the Middle East and South Asia. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph Sonic Infrastructures: Mediating National Cinemas in West and South Asia, to be published by the University of California Press in late 2026.
Her scholarship and criticism have appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Film History: An International Journal, and the Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, among other venues. She is currently at work on a second book project on media infrastructure, migration, and labor in the United Arab Emirates, supported by a 2026–27 ACLS Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Previously, she was a lecturer of Arabic and a Visiting Scholar at Tufts University, following a postdoctoral fellowship at Tufts’ Center for the Humanities. She has also held lecturing appointments at The University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her PhD in 2019.
Courses
- Approaches in Media Studies
- Media Criticism and Theory
- Media Histories
Academic Work
- Forthcoming 2026, Sonic Infrastructures: Mediating National Cinemas in West and South Asia, Oakland: University of California Press, California Studies in Music, Sound, and Media Series.
- 2024, “Gathering Despite Scattering: A Feminist and Decolonial Method of Curation” Feminist Media Histories 10 no. 2-3
- 2023, “Not Afraid of My Sponsor: Migrant Labor, Sound, and Media Infrastructures in the Gulf.” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 16 no. 2
- 2021, “Bahiga Hafez on YouTube and Feminist Archives of Egyptian Cinema.” Regards – Revue Des Arts Du Spectacle 26
- 2021, “Lessons of Pause: Writing Media Histories in the Middle East and South Asia.” Spectator 41 no. 2
- 2020, “Soundscape of a National Cinema Industry: Filmfarsi and its Sonic Connections with Egyptian and Indian Cinemas, 1930s-1960s.” Film History: An International Journal 32 no. 3
- 2024, “‘Egypt, Africa!’: Race and the Sonic Stardom of Mohamed Ramadan,” Arab Stardom: Transnational Glamour and Empowerment, edited by Kaya Davies Hayon and Stefanie Van de Peer, 165-183. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic.
- 2020, “Stars in a Nation’s Early Universe: Gender and the First Sound Films in Bombay and Tehran, 1930s.” In Shooting Stars, Drifting Authors, And Trans-regional Traffic: Industrial Networks of Cinemas of India, edited by Monika Mehta and Madhuja Mukherjee, 35-47. New York, NY: Routledge.