Eleonora Sammartino

• American Film Musical and Musical Theatre
• Feminist Film Theory
• Postfeminism and Media
• Queer Theory
• Star Studies
• Contemporary Silent Cinema
• Italian Cinema

Eleonora has graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in Film Studies from La Sapienza University in Rome. Her B.A. dissertation, titled The American Film Musical After 9/11, focused on the rebirth of the American musical genre after 9/11, exploring the connections between film industry and the socio-cultural context through the themes and forms of the films analysed.

For her M.A. dissertation, Beyond Genre/Genre: Trends in Contemporary Spanish Horror Cinema, she turned to another popular genre, concentrating on the development of the horror film in Spain in the last 20 years. Her thesis addressed the role of women, in particular mothers, in the genre through the analysis of 3 main case studies, employing feminist film theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis. During her M.A., she has also published essays in Italian on American film musical, and contemporary silent cinema.

Her PhD research brings together her interests in American film musical and gender theory, focusing on the interdependence between the forms of the genre and the representation of new subjectivities and gendered identity (masculine, feminine, queer) in it. The research tries to demonstrate how these new subjectivities negotiate their gendered identity through a performance that gestures to a fluidity between gender positions, favouring a cross-gender identification for the audience, and changing and reworking the classical forms of the genre. A more traditional textual analysis, based on postfeminist and queer theories, is complemented by ehtnographic research conducted through an online audience survey.

Contacts:

E-mail: [email protected]

Twitter: @e_sammartino987