Susan Lord

Susan Lord is Head of Department and Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Media, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Affiliated with the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies, as well as the Departments of Art and Gender Studies, she researches in the areas of cinema and media arts; cosmopolitanism; new media, gendered spaces and the city; and Cuban cinema and visual culture. She has undertaken curatorial projects of media arts, worked with artists groups and artist-run centres for over 20 years. With a background in feminist and critical theory, Susan has worked at the intersection of cinema, new media, and aesthetic theory. She teaches Media Studies, Cinema and the City, and Cuban Visual Culture, and is a member of the teaching staff for DEVS 305: Cuban Culture and Society, which takes students to Havana each May as part of the Queen's/U of Havana exchange program.

Her projects currently are concerned with citizenship practices in the media arts and civic spaces of post-colonial worlds. Theories of publicity, temporality and affect are of ongoing concern, as is the continuing project on artist groups and translocal practices. She has received three SSHRC SRGs and numerous Canada Council, OAC and Queen's research awards. Her current SSRHC-funded project is on the visual culture of Havana.

Susan has published three books:

• (with Janine Marchessault) Fluid Screens: Expanded Cinema and Digital Cultures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007; Paperback edition 2008.
• (with Annette Burfoot) Killing Women: Gender, Violence and Representation. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006.
• (with K. Dubinsky, C. Krull, S. Mills, S. Rutherford) New World Coming: The Sixties and the Shaping of Global Consciousness. Palgrave and Between the Lines Press, 2009. 515 pages.

She has been a member of the Public Access collective since 1995. Public Access is an artist-run collective that publishes PUBLIC: art, culture, ideas. PUBLIC has provided a forum combining critical thinking with visual art for over 20 years producing an aesthetically engaging journal which explores themes in-depth in each issue. PUBLIC is committed to critical work and reflection, and provides a unique perspective as a journal coming from Canada.

She is also board member and founder of Corridor Culture, an artist-researcher group based in Kingston. The Corridor Culture collective builds social connectivity in Kingston and the region's cultural sector by aiding cultural producers' travel along Ontario's rail corridors and by bridging visiting scholars and artists with diverse audiences here and along the corridor. We are a group of Kingston artists, curators, researchers, and community members, that aims to strengthen the already energetic Kingston arts community and regional network by facilitating travel and connecting cultural visitors and target audiences here and elsewhere in the region.

Her current projects include:

1. Decolonized Cosmopolitanism: The Visual Culture of Havana from 1959 to 1968. With Victor Fowler, Maria Caridad Cumana, Dannys Montes de Oca, Jennifer Hosek and Isabel Alfonso. Grounded in the visual culture of Havana during its most open period as a decolonized cosmopolitan centre, from 1959 to 1968, the investigation will be organized according to the following objectives:
   1. Document and theorize an aesthetic of decolonized cosmopolitanism through an analysis of specific forms of cultural experimentation that emerged from a new expressive relationship to the city.
   2. Analyze the relationship between cities, citizenship, and cultural production that creates, sustains, and disseminates an imaginary of and for decolonized cosmopolitanism;
   3. Produce an archive of the imaginary that Havana formed of and for itself as a city; of and for the Nation and Revolution; of and for those who came from elsewhere. The Tri-Continental Congress in 1966, the Salon de Mayo in 1967, and the Havana Cultural Congress in 1968 were instrumental in the formation of this imaginary.
   4. Investigate the legacies of decolonized cosmopolitanism: the meaning, value and function for today of this profound moment in global cultural modernity, to be considered through reflections on contemporary Havana's relationship to and transformation by global flows, in events and institutions such as the Havana Biennial, as well as informal relations established between cultural producers from different localities.
2. Images of Utopia, Documents of Belonging: Sara Gomez's Contribution to Cuban and World Cinema, co-editor with Victor Fowler, María Caridad Cumana and Zaira Zarza.
3. Moving images of Belonging: Friendship and the non-aligned world. This monograph explores cinema and media arts after Bandung. Taking cue from the new forms of recognition and world-making that took place in contact zones and new territories of decolonized citizenship, the chapters consider a range of institutional settings and aesthetic modalities that express new forms of belonging and the radical potential of friendship.