Domietta Torlasco

Assistant Professor of Italian, Comparative Literature (Core Faculty), and Screen Cultures (Affiliated Faculty). Ph.D. in Rhetoric, UC Berkeley; MFA in Film, Video, and New Media, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; M.A. in Critical Studies, UCLA; laurea in Semiotics, University of Bologna.

Prof. Torlasco works at the intersection of film theory and practice, with a specific interest in Italian and French cinema, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, gender studies, and time-based arts. Her first book, The Time of the Crime (Stanford University Press, 2008), interrogates the relation between vision and temporality through the image of the “crime scene” and the radical revision it undergoes in postwar Italian cinema. Her essays have appeared in Camera Obscura (2007 and 2011, forthcoming) Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, VS-Semiotic Studies, World Picture (www.worldpicturejournal.com), and in the edited volume Desire of the Analysts (SUNY Press, 2008). Her film, Antigone’s Noir (2008-09, 25 min., DV), re-envisions classic film noir with the help of scenes shot in contemporary settings, documentary photographs, and footage from public archives. She is currently completing her second book, Digital Memory: Antigone, Cinema, and the Archive, in which she explores the tension between memory and creation by focusing on digital films and video installations that directly appropriate analog materials.

As a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and an Assistant Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, she taught courses in Media Aesthetics and Cinema and Media Studies. At Northwestern, she teaches courses on Italian and French cinema, cinema and literature, gender and contemporary visual culture, and critical theory. She has organized the conferences Archives of Cinema/Memories of War and Media Encounters: Reimagining Feminist Thought. In the 2009-10 academic year she was the recipient of a fellowship from the Alice Kaplan Humanities Institute.

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