Joy C. Schaefer is a transnational feminist film scholar and an inclusive, trauma-informed educator. She is an Affiliate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University, where she teaches courses such as Gender and Popular Culture; Disability Studies & Representation; Introduction to LGBTQ+ Studies; and Visionary Leaders: Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga.
During the 2023-2024 academic year, Dr. Schaefer was a Junior Faculty Fellow at Ferris State University, where she teaches courses such as Sexuality Studies and Queer Cinema at Kendall College of Art & Design (KCAD). Dr. Schaefer is also a French Teacher at One Schoolhouse, where she leverages her training in personalized and competency-based learning to teach personalized, culturally responsive online asynchronous courses. From 2020-2022, she was a Senior Lecturer of Critical Media Studies at Lawrence Technological University, where she designed and taught the theory, criticism, and writing curriculum in the Media Communication program. Dr. Schaefer was a Visiting Professor of English at Grand Valley State University from 2017-2020, where she obtained a Certificate of Online & Hybrid Teaching and taught a broad range of courses from Film Culture to Contemporary Black Literature.
Dr. Schaefer earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literary & Cultural Studies from Stony Brook University (SBU) in 2017. She also holds an M.A. in French Studies from New York University and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s & Gender Studies (SBU). During graduate school, she taught in the Communication & Media Studies Department at Fordham University, where she designed the university’s first Queer Studies in Film & TV course, and in the Department of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at SBU, where she was awarded the Vivien Hartog Best Graduate Instructor Award in 2016. While in New York, Dr. Schaefer co-curated the inaugural New York Feminist Film Week at Anthology Film Archives. She has been to Europe numerous times for study, research, and work. 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).
Dr. Schaefer’s teaching and research interests include transnational feminism; film and media studies; horror; French cultural studies; postcolonial studies; representations of race, religion, gender & sexuality; disability studies; and feminist affect theories. Her work has appeared in JCMS: The Journal of Cinema & Media Studies, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Studies in European Cinema, Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture, and Cine-Excess Journal. Her book chapter, “Adapting Medical Reports into Narrative Film: Autism, Eugenics, and Savagery in Truffaut’s L’Enfant sauvage (The Wild Child),” appears in All in the Mind: Adaptations of Mental and Cognitive Disability in Popular Media (Lexington Books).
Check her latest publication:
The New Monstrous-Feminine and Teen Body Horror: Queer Crip Witches in Blue My Mind and Thelma
