Elena Del Rio
Associate Professor
BA Barcelona, MA Arkansas, PhD
Supervisory and research interests
I am happy to supervise MA or PhD students in English with a strong interest in film, particularly those whose theses examine issues of the body in cinema from a philosophical perspective (phenomenology, Deleuze). I am also interested in supervising graduate work that takes the writings of Deleuze (and Guattari) as a starting point for investigating any kind of contemporary cultural event or phenomenon.
Courses taught
I teach a variety of undergraduate courses in film studies, ranging from introductory courses to Film Analysis and Film Theory, to gender, genre, and national cinema surveys, to upper-level seminars focused on Topics in Film Theory (Cinema and the Body, Cinema and Performance, Genre Theory), Topics in Gender (Feminist Avant-Garde Cinema), and surveys of particular filmmakers (Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer W. Fassbinder, Takeshi Kitano, Seijun Suzuki). As part of our recent efforts to develop film course offerings at the graduate level, I will be teaching a graduate film course in Fall 2010, most likely a film theory survey course or a course on Deleuze and cinema.
Representative publications
“Violently Oscillating: Science, Repetition, and Affective Transmutation in Rainer Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Deleuze Studies 3:1 (June 2009): 73-96.
Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008.
“Ararat and the Event of the Mother,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 17:2 (Fall 2008): 18-34.
“Alchemies of Thought in Godard’s Cinema: Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty,” SubStance #108, 34:3 (Sep 2005): 1-17.
Remarks
I am working on a book project that reexamines the phenomenon of violence in the cinema through the angle of Nietzsche’s philosophy of bodily forces as recovered and reformulated by Deleuze.