Gerald Butters
Currently teaching:
Special Topics: Queer Film and Retrospectatorship
Gerald Butters is a historian of film specializing in the intersection of race and gender in motion pictures. A Fulbright scholar, Butters has lectured on film in Romania, Luxembourg, France and Canada and at many American universities. His books include Black Manhood on the Silent Screen, Banned in Kansas: Motion Picture Censorship, 1915–1966, and the upcoming From Sweetback to Superfly: Race and Film Audiences in Chicago's Loop. He is editor of an anthology on Blaxploitation films. Butters received his Phd in History from the University of Kansas.
Caitlyn Doyle
Caitlyn Doyle is a Visiting Assistant Professor of French. Her research is situated at the intersection of aesthetics and politics, focusing in particular on the temporality of art’s politics. Currently, she is working on a project that considers literary and filmic representations of the fugitive as both a political figure and an aesthetic category. The project considers what it means to escape, rather than solicit recognition, challenging the tendency to rely on mutual recognition or achieving visibility as indispensable to political subject formation. She teaches in the fields of literature, film, and critical theory and is the recipient of a teaching award from Western University.
Scott Durham
Currently teaching:
Introduction to Graduate Research and Cultural Analysis
Scott Durham, associate professor of French, is the faculty director for the MALit program and chair of the French and Italian department at Northwestern. He has taught both graduate and undergraduate courses in French and comparative literature since 1994, with a primary focus on 20th-century literature, film and the relationship between literature and philosophy. His scholarly publications since he completed his doctorate at Yale include Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford University Press), Jean Genet: In the Language of the Enemy (a special number he edited for Yale French Studies) and numerous articles. He is completing work on a book with the working title The Archive and the Monad: Deleuze and the Resistance to Postmodernism.Durham earned his Phd from Yale University.
Kasey Evans, Faculty Director and associate professor of English at Northwestern, teaches and writes about medieval and Renaissance literature. Her book Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England (University of Toronto Press, 2012) argues that the virtue of temperance underwent a semantic sea-change during the English Renaissance, evolving from a paradigm of self-discipline and moderation into a value of time-management, efficiency, and colonial aggression. Areas of particular interest include English Renaissance adaptations of Italian poetry (Dante, Ariosto, Tasso); ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality as they shape Renaissance English literature; and literary and critical theory, from medieval exegetes through postmodern philosophers. Evans received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch
Currently teaching:
Global Pomo: Postmodernist Fiction in the U.S. and the World
Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch (Assistant Director, Chabraja Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern University) is a literary historian who has published articles on contemporary authors such as John Barth and John Gardner, on Henry James, and on the international aspect of American studies. Her current research focuses on the reception of classical antiquity in American culture, a topic that stems from her research during an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship at Harvard University. Her most recent publication is a chapter in American Women and Classical Myths, ed. Gregory Staley (Baylor UP, 2009) on Athena as a cultural icon in the United States. She is working on a book-length study of the enduring influence of Greek and Roman myths in American fiction and culture. Elzbieta teaches classes on 20th-century experimental East European and American fiction, global and American postmodern fiction, and American 19th-century literary culture. Foeller-Pituch earned her Phd at the University of Warsaw.
Angelo Restivo
Currently teaching:
Special Topics in Lit: Cinephilia and Creative Critical Writing
My work centers on aesthetics and political affect. Specifically, I look at how, at the macro level, the moving-image work is expressive of larger social and economic shifts, while at the micro level, it registers and calibrates our affective relationship to everyday life. The moving-image objects I study range from postwar and contemporary art cinemas, to postwar auteurs, to contemporary television. In my first book, The Cinema of Economic Miracles, I proposed a new way of looking at the Italian art cinema of the 1960s, in light of both the profound spatial changes wrought by the economic miracle and the emergence of new social subjects. In ‘Breaking Bad’ and Cinematic Television, I perform a granular analysis of the series’ visual style in order to explore the ways in which it opens up to an allegorical examination of everyday life in neoliberal America. In the early 2000’s, I coauthored, with Richard Cante, a series of essays on gay pornography, which used the films to track the evolution of the post-Stonewall gay male subject in the wake of urban decay and renewal, globalization, and the rise of neoliberalism. Currently I’m beginning to explore the video essay (as critical intervention): I’ve just completed my first video essays, one of which is an accompaniment to my book on Breaking Bad.
Domietta Torlasco
Domietta Torlasco works at the intersection of film theory and practice. After receiving a PhD from the department of Rhetoric and Film Studies at Berkeley, she completed an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. From 2003 to 2007 she was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago.
Torlasco’s research and teaching interests include critical theory, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, as well as Italian and French cinema, the SF and noir genres, and time-based media arts. She is the author of three books: The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford University Press, 2008), The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). Her video essays, which explore questions of domestic labor, borders, surveillance, and debt, have screened at national and international venues, including the Galerie Campagne Première in Berlin, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
Ivy Wilson teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora and U.S. literary studies with a particular emphasis on African American culture. His forthcoming book, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Nationalism (Oxford UP), interrogates how the figurations and tropes of blackness were used to produce the social equations that regulated the cultural meanings of U.S. citizenship and traces how African American intellectuals manipulated the field of aesthetics as a means to enter into political discourse about the forms of subjectivity and national belonging. Along with recent articles in ESQ, Arizona Quarterly, and PMLA, his other work in U.S. literary studies includes two forthcoming edited books on the nineteenth-century poets James Monroe Whitfield and Albery Allson Whitman. His current research interests focus on the solubility of nationalism in relationship to theories of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits of the super-national and sub-national. Wilson has a Phd in african american studies and english from Yale University.
Jane Winston
Currently teaching:
Topics in Comparative Literature: Literature of Climate Change
Jane Winston is associate professor of French and gender studies, director of the Gender Studies Program and Jean Gimbel Lane Professor at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern. Her primary interests are in literary and cultural studies, the politics of representation, gender and race studies, feminist thought and political theory and transnational and globalization studies. She is the author of Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France and coeditor of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue. Winston received her PhD from Duke University.