Carmela Garritano

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Dr. Carmela Garritano is an associate professor in the Department of International Affairs and an affiliated faculty in the Africana Studies program. She currently serves as Director of Undergraduate Studies. Her areas of specialization include African film and screen media (with a research focus on Ghana); African cultural and literary studies; and energy humanities.

Dr. Garritano works at the intersection of politics and film and media, and her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE, the West African Research Association, and the US Department of Education’s FLAS program. Trained in African area studies, her writing combines theoretically-grounded inquiry with film studies, ethnographic, and archival research methods. Her first book African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History (Ohio University Press, 2013) is a historical account of movie production in Ghana, beginning with the first films of the Gold Coast Colonial Film Unit, through the struggles of the Ghana Film Industry Corporation, and finally to the emergence and growth of a loosely-configured, commercial movie industry between the late 1980s and 2010. The book was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and was awarded The First Book Award by the African Literature Association. Additionally, she is co-editor, with Kenneth W. Harrow, of A Companion to African Cinema (Wiley-Blackwell, 2019), a volume that brings together some of the most exciting writing on African film and media today. It spotlights research that draws from well-established methods, such as postcolonial theory, as well as new work informed by affect theory, film festival studies, and sound studies. Dr. Garritano’s third book African Energy Worlds in Film and Media (Indiana University Press, 2025) joins the work of energy humanists in analyzing the cultural and social dimensions of energy forms and systems. Its critique functions as a crucial part of the process of undoing our deep dependence on fossil fuels and advancing equitable energy transition, massively complex undertakings mandated by climate crisis.

Dr. Garritano’s current book project is tentatively called African Plasticity: A Cultural History of Plastics in Ghana. It investigates plastic production, consumption, recycling, policy, and art in Ghana from the end of the colonial period to the present.

Dr. Garritano comes to INTA from International Studies. She teaches INTA 201: Introduction to International Studies; INTA 216: World Cinema and International Politics; INTA 261/AFST261: Current Issues in the Global South, and INTA 409: Cultural and Neoliberalism. She is interested in working with students doing individual research projects on environmental or energy studies from a humanities perspective.