Laura Horak

Laura Horak is Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University and director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal. 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 Cinema’s First Nasty Women (Kino Lorber, 2022), author of Trans Cinema: Making Communities, Identities, and Worlds (University of California 2026) and Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (Rutgers 2016). She is co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana 2014), Unwatchable (Rutgers 2019), and Melodrama as Provocateur (Duke 2026), as well as a 2022 “In Focus” section of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies on transing cinema and media studies, and a 2024 issue of Reviews in Digital Humanities on trans and queer digital humanities. Horak is a white cis queer settler scholar who is here to leverage her privilege and institutional resources for the revolution.