Laliv Melamed

Laliv Melamed is a professor of film studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt. She specializes in documentary and non fiction film and media with a focus on questions of state violence, governance and politics of affect. Melamed is the author of Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence (University of California Press, 2023). Her writings appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Discourse, NECSUS, Millennium Film Journal, World Records and American Anthropologist Review, among others. She is the editor of a number of anthologies and special issues, among them Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Towards an Inventory (Meson Press, 2020, together with Philipp Dominik Keidl, Vinzenz Hediger and Antonio Somaini), a special issue on “Intimacies of Scale” for the journal Feminist Media Histories (2026, together with Tess Takahashi and J.D Schnepf) and a second special issue titled Operational Imaginaries for Discourse (forthcoming, together with Aberaham Geil). Her second book project is on the entanglement of military optics with cultural imaginaries of violence, civil consent and secrecy. In addition to her academic career, she worked as a programmer and curator for a number of film festivals.

Melamed, L., JD Schnepf and Tess Takahashi (2026), “Scales of Intimacy: Across, Aside, In-Between,” Introduction to a Special Issue on Intimacies of Scale,” Feminist Media Histories, 12 (1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1525/fmh.2026.12.1.1 Melamed, L. & Rangan, P. (2025) “The Are Shooting in Our Shadows: and interview with Al Haq Forensic Architecture Investigative Unite and Rachel Nelson (Visualizing Abolition),” in: Forensic/Counter Forensic Violence, World Records, vol. 9. https://worldrecordsjournal.org/they-are-shooting-at-our-shadows/ Melamed, L. (2023) Sovereign Intimacy: Private Media and the Traces of Colonial Violence. Oakland: California University Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520390317. Melamed, L. (2023) “A NonReport: The Operative image and the Politics of the Secret,” in: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 62 (4). http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.a904626. Melamed, L. (2022) “What is a Girlfriend? Toward a Political Concept of the Girlfriend,” in: Discourse: Journal of Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 43 (3), 421-446. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/discourse/vol43/iss3/4.