Research
Dr Temenuga Trifonova is a Visiting Fellow and will be at CRASSH in Easter term 2022.
“The Poetics and Politics of the New European Cinema of Precarity” explores the stylistic features of the new European cinema of precarity (1990s-present) and the political and social values embodied in it. The project seeks to situate historically the new European cinema of precarity by drawing out the similarities and differences between contemporary films and earlier representations of precarity in European cinema, e.g. French Poetic Realism, Italian Neorealism, British Kitchen Sink Realism, in order to establish whether the new European cinema of precarity continues the legacy of these film movements or forges a new path, and whether it replicates contemporary debates between political theorists, sociologists and economists or it stages class identity and class struggle in completely different terms. The project asks where the new European cinema of precarity locates the possibility for social and political transformation—in a particular class, in fighting for a particular good/cause, or in a particular political stance? It also aims to establish whetherintersectional approaches to precarity addressing gender, race, and (dis)ability detract (or not) from a focus on economic inequality, and whether ‘precarity’ might be seen as a middle-class concept emerging from a liberal identity politics that remains oblivious to the centrality of class.
About
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University. She is the author of The Figure of the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2020), Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (Amsterdam University Press, 2014) and The Image in French Philosophy (Rodopi, 2007), and editor/contributor of Screening the Art World (Amsterdam University Press, 2022), Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (Routledge, 2017) and European Film Theory (Routledge, 2008). Her articles have appeared in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Film Theory, NECSUS, Cinema & Cie, CTheory, SubStance, Space and Culture, Rivista di Estetica, Studies in Comics, The European Journal of American Culture, Studies in European Cinema, Cineaste, Film and Philosophy, CineAction, Scope, etc. She is a member of the College of Expert Reviewers (European Science Foundation) and a member of the Editorial Committee of the journal Europe Now, published by the Council for European Studies at Columbia University.
