Lydia Tuan

Lydia Tuan is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies and Film and Media Studies at Yale. Her dissertation, “Elemental Cinema: The Opacity of Mediation,” explores how the four classical elements of air, water, earth, and fire mediate geopolitical narratives of migration, pandemics, extraction, and climate change in European films of the post-2000s. Her research has appeared in Modern Language Notes, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, Film-Philosophy, among others. As an Agrarian Studies Graduate Affiliate Fellow, she will be writing on cinematic representations of agrarian Sardinia in the films of Salvatore Mereu.