Research Area Coordinator / Publication ManagementDR. JENNY STÜMER

Curriculum Vitae

Jenny Stümer received her PhD from the University of Auckland in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she subsequently taught media, film and communication for several years at undergraduate and postgraduate level. Her research to date explores the transnational mediation of border walls, investigating the contestation of political division through cinema and art practices. Her particular interests lie in researching film, art, and visual culture’s negotiation of politicized imaginaries with attention to gender, race, and affect.

Jenny’s work has appeared in Cultural Politics, New Global Studies, Feminist Media Studies, Parallax and Cultural Critique. Her forthcoming 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 a profound interest in the cultural politics of border sensibilities in relation to visual culture, Jenny is engaged in memory, fantasy and trauma studies, gender studies, whiteness studies, decolonial theory, necropolitics and eco-criticism. 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 area coordinator Jenny is also responsible for the Centre’s publication management and an editor of the peer-reviewed open-access journal Apocalyptica.

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

Book

Stümer, Jenny. Walled Life: Concrete, Cinema, Art (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022). 
 https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/walled-life-9781501380365/

Forthcoming Publications

Stümer, Jenny. “Her Body, Her Choice: Tough Girl Affect, Trump Support and The 2020 Pandemic.“ (forthcoming with Camera Obscura)

Selected Publications

Stümer, Jenny. “A World Under Water: Rethinking the Levee in Beasts of the Southern Wild” Parallax (27) 3 2022. pp. 323-343.
Stümer, Jenny. “Forgetting the Colonial Present: Europe’s New Walls.” Cultural Critique 116, 2022. Pp. 64-91.
Stümer Jenny and Felicitas Loest. “The Apocalyptic Word.“ Apocalyptica 1, 2022. pp 4-18.
Stümer, Jenny. “Unmasking Femininities: Desire and Fantasy in Anna Biller’s The Love Witch” Feminist Media Studies 2021. pp. 1-16.
Stümer, Jenny. “Imperial Whiteness: Fantasy, Colonialism and New Walls,” New Global Studies (13) 3, 2019. pp. 301-320.
Stümer, Jenny and Janus Currie “Aziz Istanbul, Postcards from the City: Cultural Imaginaries in Fatih Akin’s Crossing the Bridge,” Studies in European Cinema 2019. pp 1-18.
Stümer, Jenny. “The Dead are Coming: Border Politics and Necropower in Europe,” Cultural Politics (14) 1, March 2018. pp 20-39.
Stümer, Jenny. “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, 2015). pp 23-36.