Lydia Tuan

My dissertation, provisionally entitled “Media of Displacement: Reframing Elemental Cinema within European Narratives of Migration, Abandonment and Ecological Disaster,” seeks to redefine the stakes of the term ‘elemental cinema’ by proposing it as a formal-aesthetic mode through which the four Aristotelian elements contribute to an aesthetics of displacement in contemporary films that portray everyday hardships, such as migration, depopulation, and ecological ruin.