Stella Castelli

Stella Castelli holds a BA in English Literature and Linguistics and Theory and History of Photography as well as an MA in English Literature and Linguistics from the University of Zurich. She wrote her MA thesis on Aestheticized Representations of Death in American Literature and Film: Poe, Hitchcock, Craven, exploring repressions of death and their symptomatic reappearance in contemporary American culture. She is currently affiliated with the University of Zurich where she is working on her doctoral dissertation Death is Served: American Recipes for Murder – A Serial Compulsion furthering her research within this field with a specific interest in the serial depiction of death. Among articles she has published are texts focusing on the ambiguous figure of the clown, the representation of the female body in The Stepford Wives and Her as well as Foucauldian reading of Ida Lupino’s film noir Hitchhiker . Her research interests include American cultural studies, seriality and the serial, film, in particular cinematic renditions of horror, terror, fear and death, literary and cultural theory in particular Benjamin, Freud, Foucault, Blanchot and Kristeva.