Keith B. Wagner
Keith B. Wagner has a long standing interest in globalization and its manifold registers across media in non-national or localized formations. He currently teaches global media at Sungshin Women's University in Seoul, South Korea. He was formerly Assistant Professor at University College London and was a visiting professor at Seoul National University. For the last sixteen years, his work has promoted an interdisciplinary framework that merges the fields of media studies and cultural studies, film studies and art history, global studies and comparative literature. Out of this syncretic approach, his expertise extends to world-oriented forms, ideas, systems, and entities that can be grasped through audio-visual, literary, built space and communications networks, while also theorizing how such media can shape the world outside their own depictions.
Professor Wagner has conducted a number of critical interventions into the neoliberalization and financialization of culture; contemplated the intersection of mega-cities and their growing superdiversity; coined global cinema as issue-based concept; problematized deglobalization and the rise of hyper-nationalism worldwide; investigated digital culture in China, especially TikTok and CCTV; examined the workplace through precarity and recessions since the 2000s; looked at genre cycles in Asia and Hollywood reboots; sought to understand emerging infrastructures in Asia and their media conglomerates; debated the importance of globalizing atrocity studies through a case study of Cambodia; posited the undervalued representations and discourses that pertain to the World Health Organization in film, and has written widely on Korean culture, especially post-IMF film and television.
Dr Wagner is also credited with bringing Global Studies and Capitalism Studies discourses into Film Studies, with his co-edited books: Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (2011), Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory and Geopolitics in World Cinema (2022) and Global London on screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and migratory cinematic visions of a superdiverse city (2023).
To date he has edited or single authored five books, and published more than 30 articles and book chapters with SSCI and A&HCI journals and top academic venues such as Duke University Press, Rutgers University Press, University of Michigan Press, Manchester University Press, and Illinois University Press. He has given keynote lectures in Mexico, Denmark and Hong Kong and his publications have been translated into Turkish, Chinese and Korean.
Supervisors: Alex Callinicos and Mark Betz
Professor Wagner has conducted a number of critical interventions into the neoliberalization and financialization of culture; contemplated the intersection of mega-cities and their growing superdiversity; coined global cinema as issue-based concept; problematized deglobalization and the rise of hyper-nationalism worldwide; investigated digital culture in China, especially TikTok and CCTV; examined the workplace through precarity and recessions since the 2000s; looked at genre cycles in Asia and Hollywood reboots; sought to understand emerging infrastructures in Asia and their media conglomerates; debated the importance of globalizing atrocity studies through a case study of Cambodia; posited the undervalued representations and discourses that pertain to the World Health Organization in film, and has written widely on Korean culture, especially post-IMF film and television.
Dr Wagner is also credited with bringing Global Studies and Capitalism Studies discourses into Film Studies, with his co-edited books: Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture and Marxist Critique (2011), Fredric Jameson and Film Theory: Marxism, Allegory and Geopolitics in World Cinema (2022) and Global London on screen: Visitors, Cosmopolitans and migratory cinematic visions of a superdiverse city (2023).
To date he has edited or single authored five books, and published more than 30 articles and book chapters with SSCI and A&HCI journals and top academic venues such as Duke University Press, Rutgers University Press, University of Michigan Press, Manchester University Press, and Illinois University Press. He has given keynote lectures in Mexico, Denmark and Hong Kong and his publications have been translated into Turkish, Chinese and Korean.
Supervisors: Alex Callinicos and Mark Betz
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Books by Keith B. Wagner
In cinema studies today, rarely do we find a direct investigation into the culture of capitalism and how it has been refracted and fabricated in global cinema production under neoliberalism. However, the current economic crisis and the subsequent Wall Street bailout in 2008 have brought about a worldwide skepticism regarding the last four decades of economic restructuring and the culture that has accompanied it. In this edited volume, an international ensemble of scholars looks at neoliberalism, both as culture and political economy, in the various cinemas of the world. In essays encompassing the cinemas of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the United States the authors outline how the culture and subjectivities engendered by neoliberalism have been variously performed, contested, and reinforced in these cinemas. The premise of this book is that the cultural and economic logic of neoliberalism, i.e., the radical financialization and market-driven calculations, of all facets of society are symptoms best understood by Marxist theory and its analysis of the central antagonisms and contradictions of capital. Taking a variety of approaches, ranging from political economy, ideological critique, the intersection of aesthetics and politics, social history and critical-cultural theory, this volume offers a fresh, broad-based Marxist analysis of contemporary film/media. Topics include: the global albeit antagonistic nature of neoliberal culture; the search for a new aesthetic and documentary language; the contestation between labor and capital in cultural producion; the political economy of hollywood, and questions of gender, sexuality, and the nation state in relation to neoliberalism.
Papers by Keith B. Wagner
In cinema studies today, rarely do we find a direct investigation into the culture of capitalism and how it has been refracted and fabricated in global cinema production under neoliberalism. However, the current economic crisis and the subsequent Wall Street bailout in 2008 have brought about a worldwide skepticism regarding the last four decades of economic restructuring and the culture that has accompanied it. In this edited volume, an international ensemble of scholars looks at neoliberalism, both as culture and political economy, in the various cinemas of the world. In essays encompassing the cinemas of Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe, and the United States the authors outline how the culture and subjectivities engendered by neoliberalism have been variously performed, contested, and reinforced in these cinemas. The premise of this book is that the cultural and economic logic of neoliberalism, i.e., the radical financialization and market-driven calculations, of all facets of society are symptoms best understood by Marxist theory and its analysis of the central antagonisms and contradictions of capital. Taking a variety of approaches, ranging from political economy, ideological critique, the intersection of aesthetics and politics, social history and critical-cultural theory, this volume offers a fresh, broad-based Marxist analysis of contemporary film/media. Topics include: the global albeit antagonistic nature of neoliberal culture; the search for a new aesthetic and documentary language; the contestation between labor and capital in cultural producion; the political economy of hollywood, and questions of gender, sexuality, and the nation state in relation to neoliberalism.