Despina Kakoudaki

Associate Professor
Department of Literature

• Professor Kakoudaki teaches interdisciplinary courses in literature and film, visual culture, and the history of technology and new media. Her interests include cultural studies, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and the representation of race and gender in literature and film.
  
  She completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and taught at Berkeley and at Harvard University before joining AU. She has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her current book project, The Human Machine: A Cultural History of Artificial People, which traces the history and cultural function of constructed people and animated objects. She has also recently co-edited a new collection of essays on the work of Pedro Almodovar with Brad Epps (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), and has published articles on robots and cyborgs, race and melodrama in action and disaster films, body transformation and technology in early film, the political role of the pin-up in World War II, and the representation of the archive in postmodern fiction.

• Degrees

  PhD, Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley
  MA, Comparative Literature, University of California at Berkeley
  BA, English and American Literature/ Linguistics, University of Athens, Greece

• Languages Spoken:

  Modern Greek, Ancient Greek, Latin, French