Anna Torres-Cacoullos

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.