Lydia Tuan

Lydia Tuan is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies and Film and Media Studies. Her dissertation, “Elemental Cinema: The Opacity of Mediation,” explores how the four classical elements of air, water, earth, and fire mediate geopolitical narratives of migration, pandemics, extraction, and climate change in European films of the post-2000s. From 2020-2021, Lydia was a Graduate Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity and Transnational Migration (RITM), and co-convened, from Fall 2021 to Spring 2023, the Yale Diversity in Italian Studies Working Group, initiating the group’s collaboration with the UC Berkeley Italian Migration Studies Working Group during this period.

Recent publications in English and Italian include articles on Paolo Sorrentino (Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, 2019), Andrea Segre (Engramma, 2025), Lisandro Alonso (Fata Morgana – Quadrimestrale di cinema e visioni, 2021), Naomi Kawase (Film-Philosophy, 2022), Agnès Varda (MAI: Feminism & Visual Culture, 2023), and Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Fata Morgana, 2024), as well as other aspects of contemporary visual culture, such as the desktop film (Cinéma&Cie, 2021), the genealogy of the gaze from medieval elaborations of classical optical theories in Petrarch’s Canzoniere to Harun Farocki’s operational images (MLN, 2024). Her research has been supported by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, the Yale MacMillan Center, the Environmental Humanities Program, and RITM.