Name: Numertha Geisinger
College: Trinity Hall
Supervisor: Dr Isabelle McNeill
Research Topic: The Wizard, the Force, and the Rhizomatic Fold: Decolonizing Tarkovsky’s Cinema Through Deleuzian Becoming
About: Numertha Geisinger is a PhD student in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge. She holds an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge, where she received the Homerton College Master’s Prize; an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry from Boston University, where she received the Pinsky Global Fellowship; and an MA in English Literature from Queen Mary, University of London.
Research:
Her research explores various facets of Deleuzian writings including Leibniz’s fold, time-images, deterritorialization, becoming-animal, and rhizomes within the bounds of Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinema. Through these concepts, she develops the notion of the wizard and discovers his becoming interactions with virtual force within a cinematic rhizomatic enfolding structure. The concept of the wizard works to enact decolonization inceptually through desire by opening up a folding space within Deleuzian and Tarkovskian scholarship to new concepts and for non-Eurocentric discourse.
Her film research has explored attunement in Tarkovsky’s films through nomadic subjects, haptic objects, and time-images; Deleuzian deterritorialization and rhizomes in Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993); ecologies and Deleuzian becoming-animal in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010); Deleuzian time-images in Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven (2007); the ethics of the Levinasian other in Agnes Varda’s Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (2000); and Hegel’s dialectic and Jean-Luc Nancy’s trans-immanence in Sergei Eisenstein’s October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927). Her literary research includes attunement as a poetic lens in the poetry of Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz; essay criticisms exploring Susan Sontag’s imagination in Photography and Zbigniew Herbert and the image-object.
Numertha was a teaching fellow in creative writing at Boston University. She has also worked as an assistant professor in film and writing for Thrive Scholars at the University of Chicago. She was an editorial assistant for Agni Literary Journal and peer reviewer in film research for Kelvingrove and eSharp Journals at the University of Glasgow.
