Overview
Alexandra Kukulina is a first-year PhD student in the Department of German Studies. She received her BA with honors in Film and Media Studies from Amherst College. Among the topics she has studied are the material conditions of production, distribution, and preservation of film, as well as Frankfurt school approaches to theory of film. Her current research is focused on replicative media and their relation to memory, exhibition, and reception aesthetics.
In her senior thesis, "Destruction as Record: Indexicality, Ruination, and the Material Life of Cinema," she examined such phenomena as nitrate decay, institutional censorship, and reconstruction of the lost silent films, arguing that absence and decay produce knowledge about cinema's temporal condition that preservation alone cannot reveal.
She now continues to explore the topics of her thesis in the context of Eastern European, and in particular German cinema.