Despina Kakoudaki teaches interdisciplinary courses in literature and film, visual culture, and the history of technology and new media at American University in Washington DC. Her research interests include cultural studies, science fiction, apocalyptic narratives, and the representation of race and gender in literature and film. Her new book, is Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People (Rutgers University Press, 2014). She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for this project, which traces the history and cultural function of constructed people and animated objects in literature and film. Despina Kakoudaki completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, and taught at Berkeley and at Harvard University before joining AU. She has published articles on robots and cyborgs, race and melodrama in action and disaster films, body transformation and technology in early film, the political role of the pin-up in World War II, and the representation of the archive in postmodern fiction. She has also co-edited a collection of essays on the work of Pedro Almodovar with Brad Epps (University of Minnesota Press, 2009).