Gary Kafer Assistant Professor CAS | Literature
- Degrees
- Ph.D. Cinema and Media Studies, UChicago, 2023
M.A. Humanities, UChicago, 2015
B.A. Visual Studies and Cinema Studies, UPenn 2014 - Bio
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Gary Kafer’s fields of research and teaching include digital media, surveillance culture, algorithms and big data, science and technology studies, social media and video games, contemporary art, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality.
His first book project, After Ubiquity: Digital Media and the Elements of Surveillance, interrogates how the concept of “ubiquity” has dominated discourses of surveillance within twenty-first century security culture, as well as how it overshadows discourses on inequality. He is co-editor of a special issue of Surveillance & Society on “Queer Surveillance.” His research has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Surveillance & Society, American Literature, Contemporaneity, qui parle, Digital Culture & Society, Media Practice & Education, and Jump Cut, as well as in the edited collections From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Representing the Self in the Moving Image (Peter Lang, 2019), Queer Data (University of Washington Press), and the edited handbook A Companion to Contemporary Art in a Global Framework (Wiley Blackwell).
His research has been supported by The Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Franke Institute for the Humanities in Chicago. He has presented at conferences throughout the United States and Canada. Previously, he has taught at the University of Chicago.
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Teaching
Fall 2025
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LIT-204 Hidden Figures/Cultural Calcul