Faculty Directory

Research Interests

Arab and Middle Eastern cinemas; postcolonial and transnational cinemas; settler colonialism; queer theory; archives.

Biography, Education and Training

Peter Limbrick is Professor and Chair of Film and Digital Media. He is the author of Arab Modernism as World Cinema: the Films of Moumen Smihi (University of California Press, 2020) and of Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (Palgrave, 2010). He has published articles in Framework, Visual Anthropology, Third Text, Screening the Past, Camera Obscura, and Journal of Visual Culture as well as edited anthologies. 

Professor Limbrick’s first book, Making Settler Cinemas, studies the material and cultural relations of cinema and settler coloniality in the three sites of his title, all of which are embedded in British imperial history and marked by their own distinctive settler colonial politics. His book reveals the ways in which the modes of film production, distribution, reception, and representation in and between those settler societies construct a transnational politics of settler-indigenous encounter. But his book also reveals the possibilities for resisting and reconfiguring those colonial histories through the ongoing work of film archives, indigenous exhibition and guardianship, and even in the labor of film history itself. 

Professor Limbrick’s work on Arab film and video and extends his interest in cinema in colonial and postcolonial environments. His book Arab Modernism as World Cinema, on the Moroccan director Moumen Smihi, a central figure in the New Arab Cinema that took hold in the Maghreb (Northern Africa) in the early 1970s, was published by the University of California Press in 2020. Connected to this writing project, he curated a retrospective of Smihi's work which has shown at the Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; the Block Cinema, Chicago, and the Tate Modern (UK). With Omnia El-Shakry, he organized the symposium Unfixed Itineraries: Film and Visual Culture from Arab Worlds at UCSC in 2013. He has published two essays on the Palestinian filmmaker Kamal Aljafari and continues to research on experimental film and video from North Africa, Syria, and Lebanon. 

A related aspect of his research is the relationship between discourses of colonialism, globalization, and sexuality, especially queer or non-normative constructions of gender and sexuality in transnational cinemas.

Honors, Awards and Grants

UC President's Research Fellowship, 2015-16

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2016-17

L. Carl Brown book prize, American Institute of Maghrib Studies, 2021. For Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020).

Selected Publications

Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020).

(Winner of the L. Carl Brown book prize, American Institute of Maghrib Studies, 2021)

Making Settler Cinemas: Film and Colonial Encounters in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan 2010)

Teaching Interests

Middle Eastern and Arab film and video; Francophone African cinemas; New Zealand and Australian cinema; intersections of postcolonial, queer, and transnational theories and cinema; modernities and modernisms; introduction to film and video analysis.