Despina Kakoudaki is Associate Professor of Literature at American University, and director of the Humanities Lab, an interdisciplinary research center in Washington DC.  She works on film and media studies, science fiction, cultural studies, literature, and the history of technology and new media. Her book, Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural Work of Artificial People (Rutgers University Press, 2014), traces the history and cultural function of mechanical or constructed people literature, film and popular culture. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities for this project. She has published essays on robots and cyborgs, affective computing, race and melodrama in science fiction and disaster films, and the political role of the pin-up during World War 2. She has also coedited All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema with Brad Epps (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), which includes her work on melodrama and coincidence.