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 focus on the politics of digital infrastructures in the sex industries, adult film, and the materiality of sexual media. He is currently working on two monographs. One examines the historical, cultural, and political significance of the sex industries for four technologies: payment processing, video streaming, web design, and artificial intelligence. The other is a history of two important French stag films from the 1920s. He teaches courses on technology studies, information infrastructures, digital theory, feminist and queer studies, adult film history, and film and media archives. 

Professor Keilty’s research lies at the intersection of science and technology studies, information studies, cinema studies, and media studies. His writing and editorial work has appeared in Feminist Media Studies; Information Society; Journal of Documentation; Porn Studies; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Scholar and Feminist Online; Library Trends; Knowledge Organization; Cataloging & Classification Quarterly; Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (Litwin Books, 2013); Uncertain Archives (MIT Press, 2021); Queer Data Studies (University of Washington Press, 2023); and The Handbook of Adult Film and Media (Intellect, 2025). His research projects have been supported by multiple grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

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. Prior to academia, he worked in libraries and archives in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and London, UK. He received his PhD in Information Studies and concentration in Women’s Studies (now Gender Studies) from the University of California, Los Angeles.

• Infrastructure Award, Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Co-Lead editor of Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2020
• J. Franklin Jameson Archival Advocacy Award, Society of American Archivists, As a member of the Technoscience Research Unit and co-organizer of “Guerilla Archiving: Saving Environmental Data from Trump,” 2017