Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf D'04 publishes new book

I graduated from Dartmouth with a BA in comparative literature in 2004 (Harvard PhD, 2012). Most of the faculty I studied under have retired or migrated to different institutions. I am writing to you in your role as Chair. At the risk of impertinence, I wanted to pass along the good news that I my first book. Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma, was published by SUNY Press on May 1^st. 

 My book pushes the boundaries of the burgeoning field of Sino-French studies; I analyze cases of what I term "feminist refusal" in literary and cinematic texts that were produced after the 1940-1944 German Occupation of France and, forty-five years later, after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in China. In the book I argue that while canonical narratives of post-trauma art center on heroic acts of physical and political resistance, women often responded in other ways: through silence and a refusal to "move on" from the horrors of the past. Calling these forms of protest "feminist refusal" highlights the ways in which women in these films and novels were not passive witnesses to history, but actors in a drama of remembering set against the historical tides of forgetting and modernization. Professor Schlumpt is currently an Associate Professor of Film Studies, Ohio University. She can be reached: schlumpf@ohio.edu  

Her research deals with the impact of historical forces on artistic forms and offers in particular a feminist reappraisal of how historical trauma and globalization influence affective form in transnational film and literature. Her book, Remnants of Refusal: Feminist Affect, National Trauma (SUNY, 2025), examines literature and cinema from Post-Occupation France and Post-Tiananmen Square China to argue that strategies of feminist refusal can be found in the ways that these texts enact a series of affective response to the historical and social erasure of traumatic history: melancholy, ambivalence, and exhaustion. Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf's courses examine how image and text interrogate national, racial, gendered, and sexual identity politics. She has previously held teaching positions at Seattle University, Simon Fraser University, and Harvard University.