Professor Podalsky specializes in Latin American film and cultural studies.  Her research involves the relationship between Latin American culture, politics, and socio-historical formations, and she has developed projects on urban culture, questions of affect and, more recently, youth cultures. Her first book, Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955-1973 Temple University Press, 2004), was a substantive, interdisciplinary, cultural studies project. Through the analysis of new films, literature, magazines, advertising, architecture, and car culture, Specular City discusses the material and discursive transformation of the Argentine capital in relation to contemporary struggles between middle-class and working-class sectors in the aftermath of the first Peronist administration.  The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) is a more medium-specific study, exploring the evocation of affect and the deployment of emotion in contemporary film as a response to the adjudicating tendencies of postdictatorial politics and the hyper-rationalist discourses of neoliberalism.  She is currently working on a monographic study of youth, modernity, and film, comparing Argentina and Mexico in the 1950s-1960s and in the 1990s-present.

• 2020.  “Cosmopolitanism, Modernity and Youth in the 1960s: The Transnational Wanderings of Teen Idols from Argentina, Mexico and Spain.” Transnational Screens 20 (2020): 1-19.
• 2017.  “Unpacking Periodization.” In The Routledge Companion of Latin American Cinemas. Marvin D’Lugo, Ana M. López, and Laura Podalsky, eds. London: Routledge.
• 2017.  “The Affect Turn.” In New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power. Juan Poblete, ed. New York: Routledge.
• 2016. “Ponerse al día: los jóvenes y el cine argentino contemporáneo.” Cine argentino contemporáneo: visiones y discursos. Bernhard Chappuzeau y Christian von Tschilschke, eds. Amsterdam: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.
• 2016. “Aesthetics of Detachment.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies (20): 10-26. Special volume edited by María del Carmen Caña Jiménez and Vinodh Venkatesh.
• 2016. “El cine, el rock, la televisión y las culturas juveniles en los 1960s en la Argentina.” Actas del V Congreso Internacional de AsAECA. Universidad de Quilmes, Buenos Aires, March 9-11. Actas del V Congreso AsAECA 

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Teaching

Graduate:

Youth, Film, Youth Culture in Latin America                                            Introduction to Latin American Film 

The Documentary Impulse in Latin American Film                                 Latin American Urban Cultures    

Theories of Visual Cultures 

Undergraduate:

Contemporary Argentine Cinema                                                            Gender & Sexuality in Latin American Film         

History and Film                                                                                         Latin American Cinemas at the Global Crossroads   

Cuban Cinema                                                                                           Introduction to Methods of Film Analysis

Latin American Youth Cultures                                

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Public Interventions 

• "Still Moving? Violence, Visual Regimes and Affect" (38:50:00 to 58:38:00) Latin American and Caribbean Film in the Era of Neoliberalism (1985-2020), North Carolina Latin American Film Festival Conversations, October 2020.
• “Juventud y cine en América Latina” Tardes de cine: Jóvenes de película: genealogía de la juventud a partir de la producción cinematográfica en Chile del siglo XX, Universidad de Chile, August 2020.
• “The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Comments on a Book.” Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, January 2012.