Ina Karkani

Faculty of Arts and Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures

Contact info

Ina.Karkani@utoronto.ca

 

 

Office Hours

By Appointment

Classes 2025-26

Winter 2026:

GER251H German and European Cinema: Weimar Cinema History, Theory, Culture

Background

Ina Karkani (Ph.D) is a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer of film studies. She is currently researching sound practices in minor and community cinemas. She is also a film studies lecturer at the Film Department at Freie Universität Berlin, where she received her Ph.D. in cinema for her thesis, “Animalizing Film Form: A Creaturely Approach to Film Aesthetics” (2025).

Her research focuses on posthuman and decolonial film aesthetics, Native and Indigenous studies, film animal studies, feminist eco-critical studies, and affect studies. From 2021 to 2024, she held a research position as a film scholar in the interdisciplinary GRK 2638 ‘Normativität-Kritik-Wandel’ at Freie Universität Berlin. She was a funded visiting scholar at the Andean Indigenous Institute Apulaya in Calca, Peru, in 2022 and at the cinema department of the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2023. Since 2019, she has been working as a freelance film selection committee member for the section Generation at the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale). She previously was a jury member for short films at the Frames Portuguese film festival (2020) and worked at the Stockholm International Film Festival (2014).

Publications

  • Karkani, Ina (2026). Animalizing Film Form. A Creaturely Approach to Film Aesthetics. 
  • Karkani, Ina (2025). First Cow: Towards a cinema of creaturely attention. Bild und Kritik. https://www.bildundkritik.ch/posts/kelly-reichhardt-s-first-cow.
  • Karkani, Ina (2024). Zur Filmischen Inszenierung der Kreatürlichen Person. Tierstudien. Person und Persönlichkeit. Jessica Ullrich (Hg.) Neofelis Verlag.
  • Karkani, Ina (2022). Bodies out of Place: Ontological Adriftness in The Lobster. The Cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos. Films, Form, Philosophy. Eddie Falvey (ed.). Bloomsbury.
  • Karkani, Ina (2019). Bergman’s Women. Female Gender Representation in Summer With Monika, Persona, and Scenes From A Marriage. Film International, Vol.17, No.1., 50-56.
  • Karkani, Ina (2016). Aesthetics of recession: Urban space and identity in Attenberg and Beautiful Youth. Journal of Greek Media and Culture, 2(2), 201-2016.
  • Karkani, Ina (2015). Framing the Weird Body in Contemporary European Cinema. In L. Lambert (Ed.),The Funambulist Papers,Volume 2 (pp. 198–203). Punctum Books.