Eva Rueschmann

Eva Rueschmann’s research and teaching interests include film studies (theory and history), world cinema and literature, Australian and New Zealand film, migration in film, gender studies, psychoanalytic theory and criticism, Gothic film and literature, and adaptation studies. She is particularly interested in how filmmakers have used the Gothic genre and mode to address issues of gender, race, and class, and to mobilize its conventions to critique colonialism and other forms of historical and contemporary violence.

Her most recent book project, Screen Adaptations of Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction: Visualizing Gothic Terror (to be published by Anthem Press), situates film adaptations of Daphne du Maurier’s famous novels and short stories, from Rebecca to The Birds, within the theoretical framework of hauntology, exploring how her narratives persist as spectral presences across film and television. The book traces how du Maurier’s Gothic imagination re-emerges in new cultural moments as both a ghostly echo and a critical disruption, haunting the very media that attempt to contain it. The study examines recurring critical issues in her fiction and its film adaptations, focusing on themes of social role-playing and performance; gender, sexuality, and class identities; and the impact of history and past traumas on memory, perception, and fantasy.

Rueschmann has also published Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema (Temple University Press, 2000) and an edited collection of essays, Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities (University Press of Mississippi, 2003), along with articles in journals such as Post Script (on Jane Campion) and the Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies (on Taika Waititi), as well as in several essay collections. She served as president of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies from 2016 to 2020. Her more recent work focuses on hauntology, affect theory, Gothic adaptation, and the cinemas of Alfred Hitchcock and Nicolas Roeg.

Selected Publications

Screen Adaptations of Daphne du Maurier’s Fiction: Visualizing Gothic Terror. Anthem Press, forthcoming 2027.

“Traveling Identities: Teaching Migration in Literature and Film at a Liberal Arts College.” MLA Approaches to Teaching Migration, eds. Masha Salazkina and Yumna Siddiqi, 2025.

Guest editor, special issue on Australian and New Zealand Cinema, Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature 34, no. 2 (2020).

“Contested Terrains of Identity and Home: Coming of Age, Belonging and Māori-Pākehā Relations in Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople.” Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies 6.2 (April 2019): 151-166.

“Coming of Age at the Edge of the World: Female Adolescents in Vigil, Rain, In My Father’s Den, and Whale Rider.” CNZS Bulletin of New Zealand Studies, issue number 1 (2008): 17-40. Republished in Kino Nowej Zelandii (translated into Polish), ed. Ian Conrich (Krakow: Ha!art, 2009), 120-151.

“Dislocations of Home and Gender in the Films of Jane Campion.” New Zealand Filmmakers, ed. Ian Conrich and Stuart Murray (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2007), pp. 289-303.

“Out of Place: Reading (Post) Colonial Landscapes as Gothic Space in Jane Campion’s Films.” Post-Script, special issue on Australian and New Zealand Cinema 24.2-3 (Winter/Spring & Summer 2005): 8-21.

Moving Pictures, Migrating Identities. University of Mississippi Press, 2003.

Sisters on Screen: Siblings in Contemporary Cinema. Temple University Press, 2000.