josé miguel palacios
I am a film scholar interested in transnational histories of radical cinemas. My work has appeared in journals such as Film Quarterly, The Moving Image, Screen, Jump Cut, In Transition, and Archivos de la Filmoteca, as well as in numerous edited collections. My first book, Transnational Cinema Solidarity: Chilean Exile Film & Video after 1973, was published by the University of California Press in April 2025.
In August 2026, I started an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Film & Media Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor in Cinematic Arts at California State University Long Beach (2021-2026). Before that, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Art Department at Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile (2018—2020). I received a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2017 and an M.A. in Film Studies from Columbia University in 2011.
Photo by Beth Tsai
Building upon extensive archival research, my first book traces a transnational history of this radical cinema, beginning with its emergence out of global solidarity networks in the 1970s. Chronicling the dangerous efforts to smuggle film reels out of Chile, the discourses of political cinema these films inspired as they traveled between film festivals, and the prints’ unfinished process of return to Chilean archives and museums over the past two decades, Transnational Cinema Solidarity offers a politicized understanding of world and transnational cinema that emphasizes geopolitical relations and cinematic alliances based on solidarity.
the scattered body of cinema: archival thinking with raúl ruiz
I am currently at work on a second book project, tentatively titled The Scattered Body of Cinema: Archival Thinking with Raúl Ruiz. The book examines the nature of archival collections shaped by exile as well as the possibilities of a film history that foregrounds scatteredness as its fundamental precondition. Rather than an “auteur” study, The Scattered Body of Cinema thinks with and through Ruiz a series of problems, such as historiography and the archive, materiality, exile and transnationalism, and radical politics and filmic experimentation. This book project has been supported by a fellowship from the Camargo Foundation (Spring 2027) and by a Project Development Grant from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS, 2025-2026).
