Celebrating Recent Work by Eleanor Johnson

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by Eleanor Johnson

A compelling, intelligent, and timely exploration of the horror genre from one of Columbia University’s most popular professors, shedding light on how classic horror films demonstrate larger cultural attitudes about women’s rights, bodily autonomy, and more.

In May of 2022, Columbia University’s Dr. Eleanor Johnson watched along with her students as the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. At the same time, her class was studying the 1968 horror film Rosemary’s Baby and Johnson had a sudden epiphany: horror cinema engages directly with the combustive politics of women’s rights and offers a light through the darkness and an outlet to scream.

With a voice as persuasive as it is insightful, Johnson reveals how classics like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Shining expose and critique issues of reproductive control, domestic violence, and patriarchal oppression. Scream with Me weaves these iconic films into the fabric of American feminism, revealing that true horror often lies not in the supernatural, but in the familiar confines of the home, exposing the deep-seated fears and realities of women’s lives.

While on the one hand a joyful celebration of seminal and beloved horror films, Scream with Me is also an unflinching and timely recognition of the power of this genre to shape and reflect cultural dialogues about gender and power.

About the Author

 is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. She specializes in late medieval literature and culture. She is the author of four books: Scream with Me, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, Staging Contemplation, and the award-winning Waste and the Wasters, as well as two collections of poetry, The Dwell and Her Many Feathered Bones.

About the Speakers

 is a Professor and the Chair of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Hart specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century English literatures, with an emphasis on modernism, poetry, contemporary writing, and literary theory. He is also interested in connections between literature and the visual arts and between literary history and political history. He regularly teaches Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization in the Columbia Core Curriculum. 

 is a Professor of Film and Media Studies at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. King is a film historian with interests in American genre cinema, popular culture, and social history. Much of his work has been on comedy. His award-winning The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture (University of California Press, 2009) examined the role Keystone’s filmmakers played in developing new styles of slapstick comedy for moviegoers of the 1910s. 

 is the Associate Director of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of English at Rutgers-New Brunswick. She specializes in medieval literature. Her research interests include poetry and poetics, drama and performance cultures, gender studies, archival theory, visual culture, fiction, and travel literature. She has essays on these subjects in an array of journals, including Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, JEGP, postmedieval, and Philological Quarterly. Her first book, Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance (Cambridge UP) examines how episodes of sacred history – in particular, the loss of Eden, the flood, and the Harrowing of Hell – illuminate the risks and pleasures of archival process.

 is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, an Affiliated Faculty Member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law in London. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her most recent books are Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022).

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Heyman Center for the Humanities, East Campus Residence Hall, New York, United States