Biography

Kate J. Russell holds a PhD in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto, where she completed her dissertation, “John Waters and the Divine Comedy of Cult Cinema,” on the concept of cult in archives, film form, spectatorship practices, and extratextual influences in the films of John Waters (1964-1981). She has previously taught Cinema Studies and Visual Studies courses on gross out comedy, cult cinema, trash media, and introduction to film studies. From 2022-2025, she worked as Co-Managing Editor for Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, and has also served terms as co-chair for the Toronto Film and Media Seminar and SCMS’s Horror Studies Scholarly Interest Group. Her interests more broadly include: cult, exploitation, and independent cinemas; genre film, particularly horror and comedy; queer theory; exhibition and reception studies; theories of desire, eroticism, and transgression; archival research.

Publications:

“Family Values: Charles Manson and John Waters’s Cult Cinema.” In ReFocus: The Films of John Waters, ed. Michelle Moore and Brian Brems, 151-167. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2025.

von Garan, Émilie and Kate J. Russell. “Introduction: Thinking Media Beyond the Human.” The Neutral: Graduate Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 3 (2024): 1-4.

“Meeting the Parents: Romance’s Comedic Ruptures in the Familial Rom-Com.” Velvet Light Trap 92 (2023): 16-26.

“A Theory of the Gag: Comedic Mechanisms in Exploitation Film Form.” Monstrum 6, no. 1 (June 2023): 109-127.

“The Cinematic Pandemonium of William Castle and John Waters.” In ReFocus: The Films of William Castle, ed. Murray Leeder. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2018.

Book reviews:

“Death by Laughter: Female Hysteria and Early Cinema by Maggie Hennefeld.” Book review. Film Quarterly 78, no. 3 (Spring 2025): 90-91.

“Spectatorship’s Scenes Beside the Screen.” Book review. Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 45, no. 1-2 (2023): 249-255.