(Comp Lit Luncheon) Emma Widdis (University of Cambridge), “Spectatorship and Socialist Utopia(s): Soviet Cinema and the Question of How to Look”

Emma Widdis is the Professor of Slavonic Studies in the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several works on Soviet cinema, including Visions of a New Land (Yale, 2013) and Socialist Senses (Indiana, 2017).  Her research focuses in particular on Russian and Soviet cinema before 1953, and she also works extensively on visual culture, architecture and design, and popular science. In broad terms, she focuses on the links between the political avant-garde and mainstream culture, , and their shared project of constructing models of spectatorship that would correspond to new ideals of subjectivity. How could cinema create new people?