Faculty > Profile

Caroline Bem

Assistant Professor

cbem@ustpaul.ca

613-236-1393, ext. : 2237

GIG 255

Profile

Caroline Bem is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Communication. Before joining Saint Paul, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Turku (Finland) and a Postdoctoral Fellow with the German-Canadian group IRTG:Diversity at Université de Montréal. Her research focuses on the materiality, ethics, and aesthetics of media forms, which she examines through close engagement with films, video games, visual artworks, as well as narrative texts. She is also invested in theorizing the emergence of recent theoretical currents, such as intermediality and the New Formalism, and in contributing to the conversation on the place and future of the humanities within the contemporary academy. Her recent publications can be found in Screen, JCMS, and CiNéMAS (forthcoming).

Expertise

Education

Ongoing Research

Book manuscript in progress: "The Diptych: A Moveable Form"
"The Diptych: A Moveable Form" builds upon the tension that exists between the conceptuality of forms and the materiality of media. Thus, it focuses on the affordances of the diptych form as much as it is about what, in reference to the “moveable feasts” of the Christian liturgical calendar, I call the diptych’s movability—the form’s ability to combine ever-shifting states of temporality and spatiality within a singular object. If, as I demonstrate in the first chapter of the book, material diptych objects are steeped in the paradoxical time of the event (which I theorize following Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou), where spatial states of openness and closure coexist, then "diptychal thinking" is the theoretical manifestation of an ability to think through political and ethical situations whose components are suspended in a continuity of polarization. Consequently, my book centers on the ethics of systems of thinking that represent or have emerged in response to binary structures of thought. Alongside a range of material and narrative objects, which range from paintings, vinyl records, reversible books, and double bill film posters to time-based and conceptual pieces such as Wicked Wicked (Richard L. Bare, 1973) and J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace (1999), the book thus revisits writings that occupy a key role within the development of critical theory, from the foundational works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Reinhart Koselleck, Homi K. Bhabha, and Judith Butler, to more recent writings by J. Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, and Eugenie Brinkema. By unwinding the thread of “diptychal thinking” that individually traverses these works and connects them to one another, I intend to show how an ethics rooted in paradox—defined as an extended process of “sitting with” unsolvable tension—holds the potential to allow for the productive rethinking of, and perhaps even for offering solutions to, the profound polarizations that are characteristic of the contemporary cultural and political moment.

Publications

Medias