Bio

Dr. Joy C. Schaefer is a transnational feminist film scholar and inclusive educator. Her work on the representation of marginalized social identities in film has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, and she has designed and taught over forty different interdisciplinary undergraduate courses. She grew up in Northwest Michigan and is happy to be back in her home state as a full-time faculty member at GVSU. The School of Interdisciplinary Studies is a fitting academic home for her, as her teaching and research combines the (already interdisciplinary) fields of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Film and Media Studies; French and Postcolonial Studies; and Cultural Studies. Dr. Schaefer’s favorite mode of teaching is online: she enjoys leveraging her training in personalized and competency-based learning to teach culturally responsive asynchronous courses. 

From 2020 to 2022, Dr. Schaefer was a Senior Lecturer of Critical Media Studies at Lawrence Technological University, where she designed and taught the theory, criticism, and writing curriculum for the Media Communication program. She was a Visiting Professor of English at GVSU from 2017 to 2020 and has also taught in the Communication & Media Studies Department at Fordham University, where she designed the university’s first Queer Studies in Film & TV course. While in New York, Dr. Schaefer co-curated the inaugural New York Feminist Film Week at Anthology Film Archives. She has traveled to Europe numerous times for study, archival research, conference presentations, and teaching. During the 2007-2008 school year, she taught English to middle school students in Paris as part of the French government’s Teaching Assistant Program (TAPIF).

Areas of Interest

Film & Media Studies; Transnational Feminism; Gender & Sexuality; Race & Postcolonial Studies; French Studies; Cultural Studies; Disability Studies; Feminist Affect Theory; Horror

Education

Stony Brook University, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, PhD, 2017
Stony Brook University, Comparative Literature, MA, 2014
Stony Brook University, Women's and Gender Studies, Advanced Graduate Certificate, 2013
New York University, French Studies, MA, 2010
Aquinas College, English and French, BA, 2005
Grand Rapids Community College, AA, 2003

Publications

Refereed Journal Articles

Schaefer, Joy C. “Domestic AI is the New Monstrous-Feminine: Compulsory Roles for Robot-Girls & Women in M3gan (2023).” Cine-Excess Journal, Issue 6, Raising Hell: Demons, Darkness, and the Abject, 2024.

Schaefer, Joy C. “The Western Frontier & American Pulp in the Zone: Marcel Carné’s Terrain vague as Proto-‘Banlieue Film’,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema & Media Studies 60.1 (2020): 111-132.

Schaefer, Joy C. “Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child): Evoking Autism and the Nascent ‘Eugenic Atlantic’.” Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture 1.1 (2020): 10-41.

Schaefer, Joy C. “The Spatial-Affective Economy of (Post)Colonial Paris: Reading Haneke’s Caché through Octobre à Paris.” Studies in European Cinema 14.1 (2017): 48-65.

Schaefer, Joy C. “Must We Burn Hitchcock? (Re)viewing Trauma & Effecting Solidarity with The Birds.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 32.4 (2015): 329-343.

Book Chapter

Schaefer, Joy C. “Adapting Medical Reports into Narrative Film: Autism, Eugenics, and Savagery in Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child),” All in the Mind: Adaptations of Mental and Cognitive Disability in Popular Media, edited by Whitney Hardin and Julia Kiernan, Lexington Books, pp. 35-54, 2022.

Invited Contribution

Schaefer, Joy C. “Towards a Transnational Feminist Film Studies Classroom.” Teaching Global Media Dossier, edited by Juan Llamas-Rodriguez, JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2022.

​​​​​​​Select Grants, Fellowships, and Awards

Affiliate Faculty Research Grant, CSCE, GVSU, 2025.

Junior Faculty Fellow, Ferris State University, 2023-2024.

Course-based Research Experience (CRE) Faculty Grant, Lawrence Technological University, 2020-2022. 

Vivien Hartog Best Graduate Instructor Award, Women's and Gender Studies, Stony Brook University, 2016.