Siobhan S. Craig
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
11 Lind Hall,
207 Church Street SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
612-625-6087
craig026@umn.edu
Siobhan Craig's book project, "Cinema After Fascism: Broken Men, Broken Movies," focuses on the political, aesthetic and theoretical re-visioning of film as medium in the aftermath of Fascism. It explores the new cinematic languages that emerge from the rubble, both literal and symbolic, of the European cities after 1945. The specter of Fascism haunts European cinema after the war; filmmakers confront the legacies of fascist cinema in complex, ambivalent and highly coded ways. Preexisting structures of subjectivity, the boundaries of identity, sexuality, nationality and historiography, have collapsed with the Fascist regimes that sustained them. "Cinema After Fascism"examines the intersections between the rubble on the screen and the rubble of cinematic representation itself as postwar directors engage with the fascist past of their medium, arguing that attempts to reconfigure the idioms of cinema, ranging from the Neorealism of Rossellini to Fassbinder's "neo-melodramas," remain highly precarious. Professor Craig is working on a second book, "Ecce Homo: the Body of Cinema." She has been a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, and was awarded a single semester research leave, a McKnight Summer Fellowship and a Faculty Summer Research Fellowship. She recently received the Ruth Christie Distinguished Teaching Award in English.
Department Affiliations
English; Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature; French and Italian
Areas of Expertise
Fascist-era cinema in Italy and Germany; Italian Neorealism; new German cinema; monsters and hybrids; the cinematic body; literary and cultural theory after 1968: psychoanalysis, queer and feminist theories, post-modern theories of language and meaning, film theory.
Selected Publications
“The Third Man and the Wilder Side of Rubble.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (forthcoming).
"Translation and Treachery: Historiography and the Betrayal of Meaning in Anna Banti's /Artemisia." Italica (forthcoming).
"'Tu n'as rien vu a Hiroshima' : Spectatorship, Desire and the Vaporized Subject in Hiroshima mon amour." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22.1 (2005).
"The Abyss of Language and the Trace of History in Ingeborg Bachmann's 'Simultan.'" The Women in German Yearbook v. 16 (2000).
"Monstrous Dialogues: Erotic Discourse and the Dialogic Constitution of the Subject in Frankenstein." A Dialogue of Voices: Feminist Literary Theory and Bakhtin. Ed. Karen Hohne and Helen Wussow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994.
Graduate Courses
Reading Cinema and Violence
The Shattered Spectator
Literary and Cultural Theory
Undergraduate Courses
Fascism and Film
Contemporary Literature and Culture: The Split and Sutured Self
Seductions: Film/Gender/Desire
Our Monsters, Ourselves
Modern Literary Criticism and Theory
The Western: Looking Awry
Introduction to Literature: Poetry, Drama, Narrative