Rob King is a film historian with interests in American cinema, popular culture, and social history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning book, The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009), examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. He has published articles on early cinema, class, and comedy in a number of anthologies and journals, and is the co-editor of three anthologies: Early Cinema and the “National” (John Libbey & Co., 2008), Slapstick Comedy (Routledge, 2010), and most recently Beyond the Screen: Institutions, Networks, and Publics of Early Cinema (John Libbey & Co., 2012). He is currently working on two projects: a historical study of short-subject filmmaking in early sound-era Hollywood; and a series of essays on new directions in contemporary American comedy.