DEPARTMENT OF FRENCH AND ITALIAN

Domietta Torlasco is a critical theorist and filmmaker. She is core faculty in the Comparative Literary Studies Program and holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Radio/Television/Film. She currently serves as professoressa di università straniera (foreign university professor) in the PhD College of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Italy.

Torlasco’s research and teaching interests include film theory and practice, critical theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminist/queer theory, Italian and French cinema, utopian/dystopian fiction, film noir and detective fiction, and time-based media arts. She is co-founder and co-director of the Summer Institute for Audiovisual Criticism, which meets annually in Frankfurt, Germany. 

Torlasco is the author of four books on memory and technology, life and labor, queer materialities, and cinema’s potential to reimagine histories and forms of life: The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film (Stanford University Press, 2008), The Heretical Archive: Digital Memory at the End of Film (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and Futures of the Flesh: An Experiment in Film Writing (Northwestern University Press, 2026).  Her articles have appeared in several journals, including Camera Obscura, Discourse, and World Picture, and edited collections, most recently the Oxford Handbook of Film Theory. She has curated the AV Essay section of the journal NECSUS, titled “The Impersonal Essay, or Montage as Memory of the World,” and is currently at work on a book that reframes classic and modern theories of montage in the context of the contemporary image economy.

Torlasco’s films are essayistic in style and intermingle fiction and documentary to explore questions of historical memory, labor, borders, surveillance, and debt. They have appeared in online journals and screened at national and international venues, including the Kino Arsenal in Berlin, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Torlasco was a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago (2003-07) and a fellow at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities (2009-10 and 2018-19), and held research residencies at the Center for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, and at the Harun Farocki Film Institute in Berlin, Germany.