Presented by the Centre for Cinema Studies and Cinema Thinks the World \, the Critical Thinkers Series features research talks by notable and emer ging scholars in Cinema and Media Studies. Join us for the second talk in t he Spring 2026 Series by Dr. Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf\, Associate Professor of Film Stud ies at Ohio University.
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf’s recent book\, Remnants of Refusal: Femin ist Affect\, National Trauma (SUNY Press\, 2025)\, analyzes cases of wh at she terms feminist refusal in cinematic\, literary\, and intermedial tex ts that were produced after the 1940-1944 German Occupation of France and\, forty-five years later\, after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China . The book argues that strategies of feminist refusal can be found in the w ays that these texts enact a series of affective response to the historical and social erasure of traumatic history: melancholy\, ambivalence\, and ex haustion. Taken together\, these affective responses resist the social impe rative to move on from trauma and leave the past in silence. The book forwa rds the idea that feminist refusal invents new forms and styles aimed at th e reclamation and extension of an unmourned past into a future. By making a claim for the importance of these three affective conditions\, Remnants of Refusal posits a new way of understanding the relationship between texts and history\, as well as for a renewed attention to the experiences o f melancholy\, ambivalence\, and exhaustion within film and literary theory . This talk will introduce the ideas in Schlumpf's book through a reading o f Emily Xiaobai Tang’s 2001 film Conjugation\, in which a Chinese co uple tries to make sense of their lives in Beijing under martial law during the winter of 1989.
Erin Shevau gn Schlumpf is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Ohio University. She is the author of the book Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect\, Nationa l Trauma (SUNY Press\, 2025). Her work has also been published in di fferences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Critique and CR: The New C entennial Review among other journals and edited volumes. Her current b ook project\, Reproducing: Horror in Impossible Times\, looks at fil ms from North America\, Europe\, Africa\, and China that\, working across m ultiple temporalities (or\, impossible times)\, birth new monsters ( or\, reproduce horror) as a response to the global rise of theocrati c\, authoritarian rule\, the growing divide between rich and poor\, and cli mate collapse. As a whole\, Reproducing reveals how older forms of g enre cinema (the Gothic\, horror\, and dystopian science fiction) are reapp earing today in queer feminist works\, thereby allowing for a reconsiderati on of historical traumas and their uncanny repetition.
This e vent is free and there is no need to RSVP.
CATEGORIES:Featured Events LOCATION:Dodson Room\, Irving K. Barber Learning Centre GEO:49.267851;-123.253087 URL;VALUE=URI:https://theatrefilm.ubc.ca/events/event/critical-thinkers-ser ies-erin-shevaugn-schlumpf/ ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://thfl.cms.arts.ubc.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2026/01/critical-thinkers-series-Erin.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:America/Vancouver BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:-0700 TZOFFSETTO:-0800 DTSTART:20251102T090000 TZNAME:PST END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE END:VCALENDAR