Alex Hall (she/her)

Areas of Interest

• Queer and Feminist Screen Cultures
• Horror Studies
• Affect Theory
• Queer Film Aesthetics
• (Counter) Archival Studies
• Methodologies of Haunting
• Decolonial Theory
• Queer Ecology

Biography

Alex Hall is a PhD student at the Women and Gender Studies Institute. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto. Her interdisciplinary, theoretical research concentrates on the relationship between (counter) archives, affect theory, genre studies and the aesthetics around monstrosity and the queer female body in moving-image art. In “‘Traces, Glimmers, Residues, and Specks of Things’: Towards a Queer Aesthetics of Found Footage Horror,” her MA thesis developed a theoretical framework establishing an archival impulse of resistance and preservation in found footage films. Her doctoral work aims to establish a method of counter-archiving objects of queer analysis in horror media. In doing so, Alex seeks to explain how such objects can affect and translate queer modes of being through various forms of cultural haunting, thereby asking us to think about “old” objects anew.

Program: PhD 2024

Education

BA, Cinema Studies and English Literature, University of Toronto

MA, Cinema Studies, University of Toronto

Dissertation

Supervisor: S. Trimble, Dina Georgis

Selected Works

“This Girl is on Fire: Queer Ecologies of Fire and the Pyrosexual Body in Horror.” In Somatechnics, “Eco-horror’s Minor Intimacies: Affective Embodiments, Ecological Desires,” 16.1, edited by Alanna Thain and Lynn Kozak. (forthcoming)

“Lick the Blade: Locating an Archive of Queer Debris in Roberta Findlay’s The Oracle.” In Monstrum, “Queer/ing Horror: Video Essays at the Intersection of Horror and Queerness,” edited by Dayna McLeod. (forthcoming)

“Living Dead Things: Disobedient Death and the Willful Female Corpse in Antichrist and Midsommar.” In Mai: Feminism and Visual Culture, “Dead Women and Gendered Death in Visual Culture,” edited by Devaleena Kundu, Bethan Michael-Fox, and Khyati Tripathi. (forthcoming)

“Rotten Milk, Poisoned Bodies: The Vibrant Matter of the Necrotic Witch in Hagazussa: A Heathen’s Curse.” In Recasting the Bygone Witch, edited by Aíne Norris and Mariaelena DiBenigno. Vernon Press. (forthcoming)

“Eyes, Screens and Mirrors: The Returned Gaze of the Lesbian Witch in Horror Cinema.” In Weird Sisters: Psychosis, Persecution and Empowerment in Witch Narratives. House of Leaves Publishing, edited by Rebecca Booth. (forthcoming)