Patrick Keilty
Patrick Keilty is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information and Cinema Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. Professor Keilty's research interests can be divided into two areas: the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries and the materiality of sexual media. He has published articles on embodiment and technology, data science, the history of technology, cataloging, archives, design and experience, graphic design, temporality, and sexual taxonomies. His work spans visual culture, sexual politics, science and technology studies, information studies, media studies, political economy, critical theory, and theories of gender, sexuality, and race. His research projects have been generously supported by multiple grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). He is the editor or coeditor of Handbook of Adult Film and Media (Intellect 2025), Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press 2023), and Feminist & Queer Information Studies Reader (Litwin 2013). He is currently writing a monograph about the politics of technology in the sex industries.
He was previously co-chair of the Adult Film and Media SIG in the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) from 2020 – 2023, archives director of UofT's Sexual Representation Collection from 2018 - 2023, and co-lead editor for Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience from 2017 - 2019. For his work with Catalyst, he was a co-recipient of the 2020 Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Infrastructure Award. In 2017, he was the co-recipient of The J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award from the Society of American Archivists as co-organizer of “Guerilla Archiving," an effort to save U.S. environmental data. In addition to his primary appointments, Professor Keilty is a faculty member at University College, affiliated with the Women and Gender Studies Institute, and member of the Technoscience Research Unit.
- PhD, University of California, Los Angeles
Books
- Keilty, Patrick and Dean, Rebecca, eds. Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader. Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2013.
Selected Articles
- Keilty, Patrick. “Desire by Design: Pornography as Technology Industry.” [Special forum on Pornography and Surveillance] Porn Studies (in press).
- Keilty, Patrick. “Duration and Desire.” [Special issue on “Information and the Body”] Library Trends 66.3/4 (2018)
- Keilty, Patrick. “Tedious: Feminized Labor and Machine-Readable Cataloging.” Feminist Media Studies 18.2 (2018)
- Keilty, Patrick and Leazer, Gregory. “Feeling Documents: Toward a Phenomenology of Information Seeking.” Journal of Documentation 73.6 (2017)
- Keilty, Patrick. “Carnal Indexing.” Knowledge Organization 44.4 (2017): 265-272.
- Keilty, Patrick. and Shade, Leslie, eds. Special issue, “Traversing Technologies.” Scholar & Feminist Online 14.3 – 15.1 (Summer/ Fall 2016).
- Drabinski, Emily and Keilty, Patrick, eds. Special issue, “Reconfiguring Race, Gender, and Sexuality.” Library Trends 64.4 (Spring 2016).
- Keilty, Patrick. “Embodied Engagements with Online Pornography.” The Information Society 32.1 (2016): 64-73.
- Keilty, Patrick. and Leazer, Gregory. “What Porn Says to Information Studies: The Affective Value of Documents and the Body in Information Retrieval.” Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 51 (2014).
- Keilty, Patrick. “Sexual Boundaries and Subcultural Discipline.” Knowledge Organization 39.6 (2012): 417-431.
- Keilty, Patrick. “Tagging and Sexual Boundaries.” Proceedings of the 2nd Milwaukee Conference on Ethics of Information Organization. Spec. issue of Knowledge Organization 39.5 (2012): 320-324.
- Keilty, Patrick. “Embodiment and Desire in Browsing Online Pornography.” Proceedings of the iConference 2012, Toronto, ON: 41-47.
- Keilty, Patrick. “Tabulating Queer: Space, Perversion, and Belonging.” Knowledge Organization 36.4 (2009): 240-248.