Research Coordinator DR. JENNY STÜMER
Jenny Stümer joined CAPAS from Aotearoa New Zealand, where she received her PhD from the University of Auckland and subsequently taught media, film and communication for several years. Her research to date explores the politics of affect, investigating the contestation of political atmospheres through cinema and art practices, most often with reference to politicized spaces such as borders, walls and other enclosures and more recently with an increasing interest in the politics of temporality. Her particular interests lie in film, art and visual cultures negotiation of world breaking and world making in the context of politicized imaginaries.
Jenny’s work has appeared in Cultural Politics, New Global Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Parallax, Camera Obscura, The Journal of Visual Culture and Cultural Critique among others. Her book Walled Life: Concrete, Cinema, Art (Bloomsbury Publishing) treats political walls as media or affective screens that make legible the politics of their making through the investments, feelings, and narratives they inspire and reflect. The book explores the psychological and affective tissues of border imaginaries through fictional films and documentaries as well as photography, graffiti, and performance art in order to probe expressions of the ‘walled life’ that is experienced and contested in the shadows of these fences, walls, and borders.
Beyond an interest in the cultural politics of space in relation to visual culture, Jenny is engaged in memory, fantasy and trauma studies, gender studies, whiteness studies, decolonial theory, necropolitics and critical theory. At CAPAS her research focuses on the affective tensions of the apocalypse as an imaginative and (potentially) transformative force in a doomed world. In particular, she is looking into the shifting conditions and interventions of climate violence, colonial occupation, and eco-intimacies as well as probing the emancipatory and creative potentials that engage the possibility of plural worlds, embodied futurities, non-linear temporalities and radical difference. As research coordinator Jenny is also responsible for developing and implementing the Centre’s research programme across publications, events and outreach efforts. She is the editor in chief of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Apocalyptica and one of the editors of CAPA's new series 'Endzeiten' published by Matthes and Seitz.
Research Interests
media, film and communication, cinema and art practices, affect theory, memory, trauma and fantasy studies, border studies, migration studies, gender and race studies, necropolitics, ecocriticism
Publications
Monograph
Stümer, Jenny. 2022. Walled Life: Concrete, Cinema, Art. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/walled-life-9781501380365/
Editor
Stümer, Jenny and Michael Dunn. (ed.) 2024. Worlds Ending. Ending Worlds Understanding Apocalyptic Transformation. Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787009
Stümer, Jenny. (ed.) 2023. “Nuclear Ghosts: A Special Issue.” Apocalyptica 1, 2023. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.apoc.2023.1
Peer-Reviewed Articles
Stümer, Jenny. 2025. "A time of broken futures: biopolitical temporalities, postmemory and apocalyptic affect in Larissa Sansour’s In Vitro.” Journal of Visual Culture Volume 23, issue 1, pp. 95-120. https://doi.org/10.1177/147041292412761
Stümer, Jenny. 2024. “The Border Wall Imaginary at the End of the World.” Journal of Borderland Studies 1, pp. 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/08865655.2023.2301082
Stümer, Jenny. 2023. “Her Body, Her Choice: Tough Girl Affect, Trump Support and The 2020 Pandemic.“ Camera Obscura 38, 1 (112), 2023. pp.165–195. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-10278642
Stümer, Jenny. 2022. “A World Under Water: Rethinking the Levee in Beasts of the Southern Wild” Parallax (27) pp. 323-343.https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2022.2071238
Stümer, Jenny. 2022. “Forgetting the Colonial Present: Europe’s New Walls.” Cultural Critique 116, pp. 64-91.10.1353/cul.2022.0037
Stümer Jenny and Felicitas Loest. 2022. “The Apocalyptic Word.“ Apocalyptica 1, pp 4-18. https://doi.org/10.17885/heiup.apoc.2022.1.24602
Stümer, Jenny. 2021. “Unmasking Femininities: Desire and Fantasy in Anna Biller’s The Love Witch” Feminist Media Studies. pp. 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2021.1879195
Stümer, Jenny. 2019. “Imperial Whiteness: Fantasy, Colonialism and New Walls,” New Global Studies (13) 3, pp. 301-320. https://doi.org/10.1515/ngs-2019-0030
Stümer, Jenny and Janus Currie. 2018. “Aziz Istanbul, Postcards from the City: Cultural Imaginaries in Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge,” Studies in European Cinema. pp 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17411548.2019.1613045
Stümer, Jenny. 2018. “The Dead are Coming: Border Politics and Necropower in Europe,” Cultural Politics (14) 1, March. pp 20-39. https://doi.org/10.1215/17432197-4312856
Chapters
Folger, Robert and Stümer, Jenny. 2025. “Postapocalyptic” in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Millenialism and Apocalypticism, edited by Tristan Sturm and Andrew Crome. New York: Bloomsbury.
Stümer, Jenny. 2024. “Introduction: Understanding Apocalyptic Transformation,” in Worlds Ending. Ending Worlds: Understanding Apocalyptic Transformation, edited by Jenny Stümer and Michael Dunn. Berlin: De Gruyter. pp. 1-18. 10.1515/9783110787009-002
Stümer, Jenny. 2015. “The Berlin Wall Revisited: Reframing Historical Space between East and West,” in East, West and Centre: Reframing post-1989 European Cinema, ed. Michael Gott and Todd Herzog. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp 23-36.
Other Writings
Stümer, Jenny. 2024. “Apocalyptic Orientations: Towards the End of the World.” Berliner Gazette, 3 May, https://berlinergazette.de/apocalyptic-orientations/
Stümer, Jenny. 2023. “Vom Ende der Welt: Apokalypse als kulturpolitische Methode.” APuZ Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 11 April, https://www.bpb.de/shop/zeitschriften/apuz/traeume-2023/519801/vom-ende…
