Faculty Research Fellow
Angelica Fenner’s scholarship engages questions of (dis)affiliation and (un)belonging at the scales of the psychical, familial, community, (trans)national, non-human, and environmental, with attention to intersectional vectors such as race, class, gender. She has held fellowships and grants through Connaught, SSHRC, Camargo, the Waterloo Centre for German Studies, and DAAD. Current projects include an auteur study of German director Maria Speth and a SSHRC-funded collaboration with Hester Baer (U Maryland), “Feminist Film History Reframed: The Ulm School, 1962-68,” which excavates the legacies of cinefeminism among the pathbreaking women who enrolled the inaugural cohort of West Germany’s first film school in 1962.
Fellowship Research Project: An Aesthetics of (Dis)Affection: The Films of Maria Speth
My project redresses the dearth of scholarship on women directors within the 21st century countercinema movement known as the ‘Berlin School.’ Adopting an intersectional approach to film auteurism, I reframe this as more-than-human assemblage, and reconceive film authorship as distributed agency. Negative affects—those intensifying with the proliferation of homo oeconomicus—are palpable in Speth’s worldmaking, located in the silences and gaps of coherent screen action. Her films become object lessons in reframing ugly feelings as emerging from more-than-human relationalities and thereby destabilizing anthropocentric assumptions about sovereignty and entitlement.