Lydia Tuan

Lydia Tuan is a PhD candidate pursuing a joint degree in Film and Media Studies and Italian Studies. Her dissertation, provisionally entitled, “Elemental Resistance in Contemporary European Cinema,” explores how the four classical elements are represented in contemporary European films and how they mediate European narratives of migration, abandonment, and ecological disaster. From 2020-2021, Lydia was a Graduate Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM), and co-convened, from Fall 2021 to Spring 2024, Film and Media’s colloquium, Rough Cut.

Recent publications include articles on the films of Paolo Sorrentino (Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2019), Lisandro Alonso (Fata Morgana – Quadrimestrale di cinema e visioni, 2021), Naomi Kawase (Film-Philosophy, 2022), and Agnès Varda (MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2023), including articles on other aspects of contemporary visual culture, such as the desktop film (Cinéma & Cie, 2021) and the genealogy of the gaze from medieval elaborations of classical optical theories in Petrarch’s Canzoniere to Harun Farocki’s operational images (Modern Language Notes, forthcoming).