Pamela Weidman

Specialties:

Biography:

Yale University, BA in Literature (Film Track), 2017, cum laude and distinction in the major

Co-organizer, Consortium on the Novel, 2025-present

Co-organizer, 20th/21st Century Consortium, 2021–present

Co-chair, English Graduate Association, 2022–24

I am a PhD candidate in English and Film & Media, currently working on experimental character in novels and animation around WWII. My dissertation looks at how major novels and popular animated films developed techniques of limited characterization as a way of responding to the pervasive typing and stereotyping of World War II propaganda, without entirely abandoning the political uses of type. I examine reworkings of character, type, and stereotype in writings by Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison, and in films from Disney, the Fleischer brothers, UPA and the Hubleys, and avant-garde filmmakers.

Courses I have created include the writing-intensive seminars "The Illusion of Life": Animation and Character; Interactive Fiction; and Global Allegories of the Vampire; and a lecture surveying animation history. I have served as teaching assistant for introductory survey courses on early film history, English literature from the mid-nineteenth through twentieth centuries, and English literature from the late seventeenth through mid-nineteenth centuries.

Current Research:

My research interests include theories of type and character, modernist novels, animation, early cinema, early computer games, history of the vamp, Ellison, Woolf, and Proust.

Role:

Graduate Student

Selected Publications

Publications

“‘Floated invincibly’: Animating Character in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Studies in the Novel, vol. 55, no. 3, 2023, pp. 267–88.

"'A Great Blank': Reading Omission in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography and Sally Potter's Orlando (1994)." Virginia Woolf: Professions and Performance, edited by Benjamin D. Hagen and Taya Sazama, Clemson UP (forthcoming).

“Closing Questions in Ralph Ellison and United Productions of America.” Endings, special issue of American Book Review, edited by Bryan Counter, U of Nebraska P (in progress).

Papers Delivered

"Minimalist Character and Modernist Type: Virginia Woolf's 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' and Ralph Ellison's 'The Little Man at Chehaw Station,'" Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, January 4–7, 2024.

"'You': Addressing the Player-Character in Twentieth Century Texts," Narrascope, University of Pittsburgh, June 9–11, 2023.

“‘A Great Blank’: Reading the Unwritable in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography,” Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, University of South Dakota, Sioux Falls (online), June 10–13, 2021.

“‘Her proper setting’: Arranging Objects and Affects in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, American Comparative Literature Association, Montréal (online), April 8–11, 2021.

“‘Imperfect gleam of moonshine': Beholding Gothic Objects in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto (online), April 8–10, 2021.

“Dorothy Hale’s The Novel and the New Ethics.” New Novel Studies at Berkeley, University of California, Berkeley (online), March 5, 2021. Invited.

Selected Publications

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