Skip to main content

Anna Torres-Cacoullos

Profile picture for Anna Torres-Cacoullos

Contact Information

4115 FLB

Office Hours

By appt.
Assistant Professor

Research Interests

19th-21st -century Peninsular literature, film, and culture, cinema and media studies, media theory and history, visual and print cultures, modernism and the historical avant-garde, experimental literature, metafiction and self-reflexive aesthetics, fantastic literature, modernist screenwriting practices, philosophy (primarily Hegelian, and Sartrean phenomenological ontology), and digital humanities scholarship. 

See Personal Webpage here

Research Description

Her research interests are interdisciplinary and span a broad range of topics in literature and film of the late 19th to early 21st centuries. Although her current research spotlights practices of experimental film writing, her work has also considered questions of gender, philosophy, and race in contemporary literary and filmic productions within Spain.

Her curent book project, Modernist Cine-grafies: Writing with Motion Pictures, Reading with Moving Images in Spain (1918-1930), is a study of experimental practices of film writing in Spain in the first decades of the twentieth century. Her monograph contends that the early motion picture technology of silent film fomented the invention of new forms of writing and the expansion of literary genres, manifest in the production of original, literary-cinematographic forms: novel-films, film scripts, and cinematic poems. In Modernist Cine-grafies, she suggests that as writers converted motion pictures into a methodological tool to explore what it meant to fuse literature and film, motion pictures became an occasion to also interrogate what it meant to write for different kinds of reading. Ultimately, as these new textual forms launched inquiries into notions of medium, genre, audience, and expression, they drew attention to the nature of reading, raised questions about the multifaceted ways to tell a story, and highlighted questions of meaning production to challenge ideas about the very nature of literary writing.

 

Other research projects:
- Early script culture in Spain and the professionalization of screenwriting practices;
-Tracing a digital archaeology of early Spanish film fandom, particularly the development of the male movie fan, through the text mining of popular Spanish film magazines of the 1920s. 

Education

Ph.D.               Spanish Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2020   

M.A.               Spanish Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2016  

B.A.                Spanish, The Pennsylvania State University, 2013  

B.A.                Comparative Literature, The Pennsylvania State University, 2013

 

Grants

Humanities Research Institute (HRI) Campus Fellowship  (2023-2024)

 

Courses Taught

Graduate Courses 

Span 465. People & Environment in Times of Crisis: Views from Contemporary Cultural Productions (20th-21st C Spanish Studies) (Fall '23)

Span 590. Transatlantic Metafictions, Experimental Forms (Spring '23)

Span 528. The Spanish Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema (Spring '22) 

Undergraduate Courses

Span 312. Strange Worlds (Fall '23)

Span 312. Writing Otherness: Specters, Misfits, and Selves (Fall '22; Spring '23) 

Span/LLS 246. Bodies out of Place: Destabilizing Geographies of Identity in Latina/o Literature and Visual Culture (Spring '21)

Additional Campus Affiliations

European Union Center

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS)

Highlighted Publications

1) "When Fiction is Stranger than Truth: Metaliterary Preoccupation and Philosophical Burlesque in Locos: A Comedy of Gestures (1936)," Modern Language Notes, Vol. 138, No. 2 (March 2023): 323-342. DOI: 10.1353/mln.2023.a915370. Abstract here.

2) "Unmasking the Metropolis: An Interrogation of Modernity in Orfeu Negro/Black Orpheus (1959)," Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, Vol. 9, No. 2 (2023): 245-270. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/24741604.2023.2274219Abstract here.

3) "On Being (Social), Selfhood, and the Creative Experience in the Digital Age in Clara Janés' Vilanos (E-mails) (2004)," Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Vol. 99, No. 8 (2022): 1293-1319. DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2022.2139495

4) "Cinema as Method: Re-vision in Ramón Goméz de la Serna's Film Script Cifras (1930)," Modernism/modernityVol. 29, No. 4 (2023): 717-740. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mod.2022.0036.  Abstract here.

5) "Writing for New Literacies: Pío Baroja's Novela Film (1929)," Revista Hispánica Moderna, Vol. 76, No. 1 (June 2023): 73-93. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/rhm.2023.0003. Abstract here.

6) “The Possibility of Becoming in Pedro Almodóvar’s Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988) and Los abrazos rotos (2009),” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 96.2 (2019): 181-199. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2019.11.  

7) “‘Salve, risueña mentira’: Cosmic Hyperbole, Confession, and Historical Consciousness in Ramón del Valle-Inclán’s Sonata de invierno (1905),” Bulletin of Spanish Studies (2019): 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/14753820.2019.1613743.