Welcome to Dr. Simone Pfleger!
The Department welcomes our postdoctoral fellow Dr. Simone Pfleger who for the 2018/19 academic year will be working with Dr. Susanne Luhmann. Simone earned a Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 2018. Her dissertation introduces the notion of (un)timeliness to describe a subject's relationship to the temporal mandates of neoliberal capitalism and studies the emergence of non-conforming identities and bodily desire. Her work is grounded in gender and queer theoretical methodologies, affect and intimacy, and focuses on representations of precarity in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century literature, film, and culture.
Simone's postdoctoral research project will study a cluster of contemporary films that represent mobility and precarity within the structures of cultural and economic neoliberal systems and asks: what types of subjects are able to move around freely and which ones find themselves trapped in exploitative and debilitating working conditions and social relationships? The large question of Simone's work examines what is at stake when bodies endure the increasingly precarious conditions of contemporary global capitalism, mass consumerism, and neoliberalism.
In the fall 2018 term, Simone teaches our introductory course WGS 101: Representations of Women and Girls.