Emre Caglayan

Professor Çağlayan joined the American University of Paris in 2022 after teaching at New York University London, University of Brighton and Newcastle University in the United Kingdom, where he lived for many years. He completed his PhD in Film Studies in 2014 at the University of Kent. His widely cited thesis Screening Boredom: The History and Aesthetics of Slow Cinema was later published as Poetics of Slow Cinema: Nostalgia, Absurdism, Boredom by Palgrave in 2018.

Çağlayan's current research project examines the intersections between the embodied experiences of walking and cinema, and investigates the dimensions in which our relationship to urban and natural space is configured through film. He aims to go beyond considering the representation of walking on screen and instead invites audiences to take part in walking activities and share their individual as well as collective experiences. Through curating film seasons and designing walking prompts, Çağlayan proposes to place an audience’s uniquely individual response to a particular film in dialogue with a particularly commonplace activity, and guides them to reflect on the diverse ways of being in and belonging to the world.

Professor Çağlayan is a scholar of film theory with an expertise in global art cinema and its aesthetic, geopolitical and institutional contexts. His research explores the ways in which cinema shapes our lived experience and is supported by a historically grounded close analysis of texts and the cultural ecology of their production. His most recent publications focus on the affective qualities of film music and sound design, representations of urbanscapes and masculinity, ethics of political filmmaking, and artists's correspondences through film and video.