Education:
B.A., Grinnell College;
M.F.A., New York University, Tisch School of the Arts;
Ph.D., University of Southern California, Critical Studies Department, School of Cinematic Arts

"Confused things lead the mind to new inventions."
- Geoffrey Galt Harpham, On the Grotesque

Allison de Fren
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology

Specializations:

• Film and media studies
• Digital media and art production
• Visual and techno-culture
• Gender and technology
• Non-fiction film and media

Allison de Fren was with Connecticut College as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow from 2008-2010 in the Ammerman Center for Arts & Technology.

She is a film and media scholar, as well as an award-winning media practitioner, whose dissertation on representations of artificial female bodies, from the Renaissance to the present, was an outgrowth of a feature-length documentary that she produced and directed. The film, The Mechanical Bride (an homage to Marshall McLuhan), explores the Pygmalionesque fantasy of creating the perfect female artificially, particularly as it is represented within science fiction film, television, and literature, and the ways in which the fantasy both informs and conflicts with the current-day attempt to create robotic companions.

Her current research and practice focuses on issues around embodiment and technology in relation to gender, and her pastimes include dolls, puppets, robots and other uncanny assemblages. She has recently published two essays in back-to-back special issues of Science Fiction Studies Journal (July and November 2009). Her essay “The Anatomical Gaze in Tomorrow’s Eve (L’Eve future)” won a 2009 Schachterle Prize, Best Essay in Literature and Science by an Untenured Scholar, from The Society for Science, Literature and the Arts.

Her previous teaching experience includes work as a media instructor at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML), a pilot program at USC for integrating digital skills and critical knowledge within the general undergraduate curriculum. At Connecticut College, she is teaching Introduction to New Media and Digital Art; Remix/Mash-up: The Theory and Practice of Culture Jamming; and Autobiographical Documentary: The Theory and Practice of First-Person Media.

Her presentations included:

• “Bringing out the Dead: The Autoptic Encounter in Anatomy for Beginners” at Visible Evidence XVI International Documentary Conference, University of Southern California, August 2009.
• “Disarticulations of Artificial Women” at HASTAC III: Traversing Digital Boundaries, hosted by the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (ICHASS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, April 2009.
• “The Surreal Desires of the Internet Fetish Community alt.sex.fetish.robots” at The Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Philadelphia, PA, March 2008.
  

Visit the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology website.