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Join us for a Research Fridays event with Dr. Loredana Bercuci, Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at West University of Timișoara, Romania.

Description

In the last two decades, trauma has been defined by its increased representation in autobiographical texts. Such texts range today from printed-word memoirs to graphic memoirs to autodocumentaries, and autobiographical videogames. Not only is trauma a preferred “stabilizer of identity” (Assmann 16) in autobiographical texts, but this mode of writing is favored in the 21st Century for the representation of trauma. Although trauma and memory have been a focus of cultural studies for more than thirty years now, few scholarly works focus on medium-specific representations of trauma. In this talk, I explore what the transfer to various autobiographical media has meant for the representation of trauma by analyzing the graphic memoir Stitches (2009), the autodocumentary Val (2021), and the autobiographical video games Father and I (2013) and That Dragon, Cancer (2016). It will be argued that for a trauma representation to be considered successful, each medium adapts its own means to adhere to a certain definition of trauma and in this manner a particular piece of life writing is accepted as a successful and reliable representation of trauma. The representation of trauma in these autobiographical media has created a new trauma aesthetics that is defined by a cautious (re)engagement with the real.

About the Speaker

Loredana Bercuci, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages at West University of Timișoara, Romania, where she teaches courses in American Cultural Studies and academic writing. She holds a PhD in American Studies, with a focus on trauma and transmedia storytelling. In 2016-2017, she conducted research at Empire State College, State University of New York as a Fulbright scholar. Her research interests include trauma studies, adaptation studies, American popular culture, and teaching academic writing. Her most recent publications include: “(Re)drawing the line: Deficit and empowerment in articles on writing research from Central and Eastern Europe” (in Language and the Knowledge Economy, Routledge, 2025)  and Trauma and the Mediated Self: Contemporary Life Writing Across Media (Lexington Books/Bloomsbury, 2024). In September 2025, Loredana will be an Erasmus+ visiting faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University.