{"id":2177,"date":"2014-11-05T09:48:08","date_gmt":"2014-11-05T14:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/?post_type=cu_people&p=2177"},"modified":"2026-02-12T14:42:53","modified_gmt":"2026-02-12T19:42:53","slug":"laura-horak","status":"publish","type":"cu_people","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/people\/laura-horak\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Horak"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Laura Horak is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the\u00a0Transgender Media Lab<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Transgender Media Portal<\/a>. She investigates the history of transgender and queer film and media in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. She is co-curator of the 99-film Bluray set\u00a0Cinema\u2019s First Nasty Women<\/a>\u00a0(Kino Lorber, 2022), author of\u00a0Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds<\/a><\/em> (University of California 2026) and\u00a0Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema<\/a><\/em>\u00a0(Rutgers 2016). She is co-editor of\u00a0Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space\u00a0<\/a><\/em>(Indiana 2014),\u00a0Unwatchable\u00a0<\/a><\/em>(Rutgers 2019), and\u00a0Melodrama as Provocateur<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(Duke 2026), as well as a 2022 \u201cIn Focus\u201d section of\u00a0Journal of Cinema and Media Studies<\/em>\u00a0on\u00a0transing cinema and media studies<\/a>, and a 2024 issue of\u00a0Reviews in Digital Humanities<\/em>\u00a0on\u00a0trans and queer digital humanities<\/a>. Horak is a white cis queer settler scholar who is here to leverage her privilege and institutional resources for the revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Laura Horak answers the question: Why study film?<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Read Horak\u2019s new book, Trans Cinema!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Cross-appointments and affiliations:\u00a0Feminist Institute of Social Transformation<\/a>;\u00a0Communication and Media Studies<\/a>;\u00a0Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture<\/a>;\u00a0Collaborative Specialization in Digital Humanities<\/a>;\u00a0Sexuality Studies<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horak investigates how cinema has helped envision new forms of gender and sexuality, from the early twentieth century to today. With colleagues in the United States and Europe, she is establishing a new field at the intersection of transgender studies and cinema and media studies. Founder of the Transgender Media Lab, she is creating novel digital tools to connect scholarly work with marginalized communities and is bringing forgotten films to the public through international festivals, DVD releases, and streaming platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horak works in transgender studies, a discipline that centres the lived experiences and theories of transgender, Two-Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and other gender-nonconforming people. With frequent collaborators C\u00e1el M. Keegan and Eliza Steinbock, she is helping to establish a new subfield: trans cinema and media studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horak publishes regularly on trans filmmaking practices.Her article, \u201cTrans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility, Temporality<\/a>\u201d (2014) has been cited in scholarship from a range of disciplines, in English, German, Swedish, Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese. She argues that trans YouTube videos succeed because their formal strategies exploit the platform\u2019s penchant for the personal and the spectacular.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Based on archival research in Toronto, Victoria, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Horak has published on\u00a0the hundred-year history of trans filmmaking in Canada and the US<\/a>\u00a0and the political, cultural, and aesthetic work of\u00a0the world\u2019s first trans film festivals<\/a>. She is currently writing a book analyzing trans filmmaking in North America from the 1990s to today,\u00a0Trans Cinema: An Introduction<\/em>. She is also bringing attention to the works of trans filmmakers in Canadian film heritage as a collaborator on Janine Marchessault\u2019s SSHRC Partnership Grant\u00a0Archive\/Counter-Archive<\/a>\u00a0and as an associate member of Susan Lord\u2019s CFI-funded\u00a0Vulnerable Media Lab<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horak is building the field of trans cinema and media studies through a series of federally and provincially funded grants \u2013 a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (2017-2019), a SSHRC Insight Grant (2020-2025), and an Ontario Early Researcher Award (2019-2024). With this support, she has founded the\u00a0Transgender Media Lab<\/a>, a virtual and physical space for students and scholars working at the intersections of trans studies and media studies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Working from the framework of intersectional feminist digital humanities, Horak is creating new digital tools to connect her scholarship with diverse trans communities. A key project of the Transgender Media Lab is the\u00a0Transgender Media Portal<\/a>, a website that highlights the innovative work of trans filmmakers over the past half-century. The Portal enables new ways of analyzing trans film production and distribution and shares information with educators, students, festival programmers, artists, activists, and the public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In addition to her work on trans-made cinema, Horak explores feminist, queer, and trans lessons of early twentieth-century cinema in the United States and Sweden and brings long-forgotten silent films to international publics. Horak\u2019s monograph,\u00a0Girls Will Be Boys<\/em><\/a>, uses archival research to overturn long-standing assumptions about gender and sexuality in American film history, and reveals the fascination of early audiences with varied forms of female masculinity. Chosen by\u00a0Huffington Post<\/em>\u00a0as one of the Best Film Books of 2016, it was also a 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a finalist for the 2016 Richard Wall Memorial Award by the Theatre Library Association in the US, and was longlisted for the 2016 Kraszna-Krausz Best Moving Image Book in the UK. Moreover, it has been cited in books and articles from a range of disciplines, in English, German, Swedish, Czech, and Spanish. Horak is writing a monograph titled\u00a0Cinema\u2019s Oscar Wilde<\/em>\u00a0(Rutgers UP) that demonstrates how cinema participated in the Swedish project of modernizing sexuality in the 1910s and 1920s via a case study of the gay, Jewish, Finnish-Swedish director Mauritz Stiller.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Horak brings the\u00a0results of her research to the public by programming feminist, queer, and trans silent films at film\u00a0festivals in Italy, Sweden, and the United States. Through a SSHRC Partnership Development Grant (2020-2023) titled\u00a0Cinema\u2019s First Nasty Women<\/a>, she collaborated with eleven film archives across Europe and North America,\u00a0Kino Lorber<\/a>,\u00a0Le Giornate del Cinema Muto<\/a>, and the\u00a0Women Film Pioneers Project<\/a>, to make 99 silent films featuring cross-dressing women and women comedians publicly available for the first time.\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0called the project a\u00a0\u201cmind-expanding endeavour\u201d<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0\u201ctriumph of scholarship.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Horak\u2019s research demonstrates the key role of cinema in shaping the possibilities of gender and sexuality in our lives. Her scholarship is defined by international and interdisciplinary collaborations and, like cinema itself, her work brings people together across disciplines, national boundaries, and the academia\/public divide to consider anew how media can reveal unexpected possibilities for more liberating ways of living our identities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Videos<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Developing Values & Putting Them Into Action: Building the Transgender Media Portal at Moving Trans History Forward Conference<\/a> (September 2023).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PBS American Experience | Transcending Media: How Narrative Shapes Trans Lives<\/a> (July 2023).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cinema\u2019s First Nasty Women at UCLA Film & Television Archive<\/a> (September 2022)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Selected Publications<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

See all publications on Google Scholar<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds.<\/a> University of California Press, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melodrama as Provocateur<\/em>.<\/a> By Linda Williams. Edited by Christine Gledhill, Laura Horak, and Elisabeth R. Anker. Duke University Press, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEnacting Our Values: Practical Applications of Ethics in the Transgender Media Lab.\u201d<\/a> Co-written with Evie Johnny Ruddy. In The Companion to Digital Humanities in Practice<\/em>, edited by Constance Crompton, Laura Estill, Richard J. Lane, and Ray Siemens. Routledge, 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Special Issue on Queer and Trans Digital Humanities (open access).<\/a> Reviews in Digital Humanities<\/em> 5, no. 7 (July 2024). Co-edited with Constance Crompton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGuest Editor\u2019s Note\u201d (open access).<\/a> Co-written with Constance Crompton. Reviews in Digital Humanities<\/em>5, no. 7 (July 2024).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Special issue on Curating Feminist Film Archives.<\/a> Feminist Media Histories<\/em> 10, no. 2-3 (Spring-Summer 2024). Co-edited with Maggie Hennefeld. 320 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cEditor\u2019s Introduction: Why We Curate Feminist Film Archives.\u201d<\/a> Co-written with Maggie Hennefeld. Feminist Media Histories<\/em> 10 (2-3), 1-9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFeminist World-Making with Cinema\u2019s First Nasty Women:<\/a> A Roundtable with Neta Alexander, Kaveh Askari, Ren\u00e9e C. Baker, Jennifer Bean, Liza Black, Enrique Moreno Ceballos, Maggie Hennefeld, Laura Horak, Dana Reason, Elif Rongen-Kaynak\u00e7i, Kate Saccone, Aurore Spiers, Gonca Feride Varol, Yiman Wang, and Bret Wood.\u201d Co-conducted with Maggie Hennefeld and Rachel Loewen. Feminist Media Histories<\/em> 10 (2-3), 114-125.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Many Genders and Sexualities of American and European Silent Cinema.\u201d<\/a> For Oxford Handbook of Silent Cinema<\/em>, edited by Rob King and Charlie Keil, 684-713. Oxford: Oxford University Press, February 2024. 29 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGirls Will Be Boys in German Silent Cinema\u201d (open access).<\/a> NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies<\/em>, June 7, 2023.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Focus section on Transing Cinema and Media Studies (open access).<\/a> Journal of Cinema and Media Studies<\/em> 61, no. 2 (Winter 2022). Co-edited with C\u00e1el M. Keegan. 49 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cRepresenting Ourselves into Existence: The Cultural, Political, and Aesthetic Work of Transgender Film Festivals in the 1990s.\u201d<\/a> In The Oxford Companion to Queer Cinem<\/em>a, edited by Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo, 511-540. Oxford: Oxford University Press, November 2021. 29 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c#WeAreTheGlobalCluster: Affectivity, Resistance, and Sense8<\/em> Fandom,\u201d co-written with Rox Samer. In Sense8: Transcending Television<\/em>, edited by Deborah Shaw and Rob Stone, 197-218. London: Bloomsbury Press, May 2021. 21 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2018We\u2019d like to see trans people at the very top\u2019: In Conversation with Transgender Talent Founder Ann Thomas.\u201d<\/a> Feminist Media Histories<\/em> 7, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 21-29.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCurating Trans Erotic Imaginaries.\u201d<\/a> Transgender Studies Quarterly<\/em> 7, no. 2 (Spring 2020): 274-287.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cVisibility and Vulnerability: Translatina World-making in The Salt Mines<\/em> and Wildness<\/em>\u201d (open access).<\/a> In The Power of Vulnerability: Mobilizing Affect in Feminist, Queer and Anti-Racist Media Cultures<\/em>, edited by Anu Koivunen, Katariina Kyr\u00f6l\u00e4 and Ingrid Ryberg, 95-115. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 21 pp. (open access)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTrans Studies.\u201d<\/a> Special issue on Genealogies of Feminist Media History<\/a>. Feminist Media Histories<\/em> 4, no. 2 (April 2018): 201-206. 5pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Special issue on Cinematic Bodies<\/a>. Somatechnics<\/em> 8, no. 1 (March 2018). Co-edited with C\u00e1el M. Keegan and Eliza Steinbock. 142 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCinematic\/Trans*\/Bodies Now (and Then, and to Come).\u201d<\/a> Introduction to special issue on Cinematic Bodies. Somatechnics<\/em> 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2018): 1\u201313. Co-written with C\u00e1el M. Keegan and Eliza Steinbock. 14pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCross-Dressing in Griffith\u2019s Biograph Films: Humor, Heroics, and Edna \u2018Billy\u2019 Foster\u2019s Good Bad Boys.\u201d<\/a> In A Companion to D.W. Griffith<\/em>, edited by Charlie Keil, 284\u2013308. Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018. 25pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTracing the History of Trans and Gender Variant Filmmakers.\u201d<\/a> Special issue on Transgender Media. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism<\/em>37, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 9-20. 11 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSense8 Roundtable.\u201d<\/a> Co-written with Roxanne Samer. With Moya Bailey, micha c\u00e1rdenas, Lokeilani Kaimana, C\u00e1el M. Keegan, Geneveive Newman, Roxanne Samer, and Raffi Sarkissian. Special issue on Transgender Media. Spectator: The University of Southern California Journal of Film and Television Criticism<\/em> 37, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 74-88.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Nasty Women of Silent Cinema\u201d (open access).<\/a> Co-written with Maggie Hennefeld. Ms. Magazine Blog<\/em>. October 25, 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCross-Dressing and Transgender Representation in Swedish Cinema, 1908-2017.\u201d<\/a> European Journal of Scandinavian Studies<\/em> 47, no. 2 (2017): 377-397. 21pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUsing Digital Maps to Investigate Cinema History\u201d (open access).<\/a> In The Arclight Guide to Media History and the Digital Humanities<\/em>, edited by Charles Acland and Eric Hoyt, 65-102. Falmer: REFRAME\/Project Arclight (2016). 38 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTrans on YouTube: Intimacy, Visibility, Temporality.\u201d<\/a> Special issue on Trans Cultural Production. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly<\/em> 1, no. 4 (December 2014): 572-585. 14 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSex, Politics, and Swedish Silent Film: Mauritz Stiller\u2019s Feminism Comedies of the 1910s.\u201d<\/a> Journal of Scandinavian Cinema<\/em> 4, no. 3 (September 2014): 193-208. 16 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space<\/em><\/a>. Co-edited with Jennifer Bean and Anupama Kapse. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. 360 pp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2018Would you like to sin with Elinor Glyn?\u2019: Film as a Vehicle of Sensual Education.\u201d<\/a> Camera Obscura<\/em> 25, no. 2 74 (2010): 75-117. 42 pp.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4947,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"cu_people_first_name":"Laura","cu_people_last_name":"Horak","cu_people_initials":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_people_type":[16],"cu_people_expertise":[],"class_list":["post-2177","cu_people","type-cu_people","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_people_type-full-time-faculty"],"acf":{"cu_people_job_title":"Full Professor","cu_people_degree":"MA and Ph.D. (UC-Berkeley), BA (Yale University)","cu_building":"","cu_people_office_num":"","cu_people_pronoun":"","cu_people_designation":"","cu_people_email":"laura.horak@carleton.ca","cu_people_phone":"","cu_people_phone_ext":"","cu_people_linkedin":"","cu_people_bluesky":"","cu_people_twitter":"","cu_people_instagram":"","cu_people_facebook":"","cu_people_website":"https:\/\/calendly.com\/laura-horak\/","cu_people_orcid":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people\/2177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_people"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people\/2177\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6273,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people\/2177\/revisions\/6273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_people_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people_type?post=2177"},{"taxonomy":"cu_people_expertise","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/filmstudies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_people_expertise?post=2177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}