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Background

Andrea Gyenge is a scholar of the critical humanities with a focus on the history and theory of the moving image. Her research explores orality and the mouth in film culture, critical theory and continental philosophy. Her essays on the history of philosophy and moving image culture have appeared in Angelaki, New German Critique, Free Associations and Cultural Critique as well as edited collections. She is also the co-author of a new "Afterword" (with John Paul Ricco) in Jean-Luc Nancy's posthumously published Corpus III, which explores Nancy's philosophy of the mouth.

She is currently working on two book projects. Her first project, Buccal Cinemas: Orality and Cinematic Form, theorizes the ontological traffic between the mouth and the image in film aesthetics. The book brings together a diverse array of cinematic materials filled with mouths that eat, scream, kiss, drool and breathe, including from Paul Sharits, James Williamson, Ingmar Bergman, John Carpenter and Tony Conrad. The book further argues that thematics of the mouth and orality are abundant in classical and contemporary film theory, especially in the French tradition. The book draws examples from several critics and philosophers, including Jean Epstein, Michel Chion, Roland Barthes and Jean-Luc Nancy, who use orality as a convergent path for theorizing cinema’s formal powers and as a vehicle for critical expression—a conduit for the excitations of cinephilia and the writerly erotics of film spectatorship.

Her focus on orality has brought her research into contact with sound studies, especially scholarship exploring the sensorial relationship between corporeality and sound. Current working essays include a meditation on film sound in The Zone of Interest that argues for its importance to theorizing the politics of acousmatic sound.

Her second project, The Life-Image: An Essay in Biopolitical Resistance is a collaboration with Cesare Casarino on Anglo-American experimental media produced during the AIDS crisis. Using archival research conducted at the AIDS Activist Videotape Collection at the New York Public Library, the book focuses on filmmakers who challenged clichéd media representations of death by AIDS. By refusing to represent their deaths as consumable media, we argue that they create a new image of political resistance: a concept called the “life image.” Drawn from the film philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, we offer the concept as both a critique of the economics of media and a liberation of the body’s potentiality for life. The book thus unites Deleuzian film studies, biopolitical philosophy and the cultural analysis of HIV/AIDS to produce a new account of film aesthetics in the time of AIDS.

Gyenge received her PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto — Mississauga. She has also taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and, most recently, at Wellesley College.

She welcomes inquiries from undergraduates and prospective MFA students about the 91���� Cinema Department and her current course offerings

Select publications

• “Fabula, Bucca, Humanitas.” In Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism. Edited by Cosmin Toma. Bloomsbury Press, January 2023
• “Afterword” (with John Paul Ricco). In Corpus III. By Jean-Luc Nancy. Fordham University Press. December 2022
• “Elastics of the Film Mouth.” In Faces on Screen: New Approaches. Edited by Alice Maurice. Edinburgh University Press, June 2022
• “Laocoön’s Scream or Lessing Redux.” New German Critique, no. 142, February 2021

Education

• PhD, Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, University of Minnesota (2018)
• BA Honors, Cultural Studies and Women’s Studies, Trent University (2007)

Research Interests

• Film Aesthetics
• Critical Theory and Continental Philosophy
• Theories of the Body (especially the mouth and orality)
• Sound Studies

Teaching Interests

• History and Theory of the Moving Image
• Critical Theory
• Popular Media and Mass Culture