Karla Oeler teaches in the Film and Media Studies Program at Stanford University in the Department of Art & History. Her research interests are film and cinema history, with emphases including the theory and practice of Sergei Eisenstein, as well as visual culture and the relations between film aesthetics, literature, theory and philosophy. She is the author of A Grammar of Murder: Violent Scenes and Film Form (University of Chicago Press, 2009).  Her work has appeared in numerous forums including Cinema Journal, The Journal of Visual Culture. She is currently writing a book called “The Surface of Things: Cinema and Interiority.”