I am Assistant Professor of French at Bentley University. I hold a Ph.D. in French from Columbia University (2016). I also received a B.A. in French and in Film studies from the University of California at Berkeley (2008). My primary research focus is French and Francophone cinema and television of the 1950s and 1960s. I am also interested in other periods of French and Francophone cinema, documentary cinema, and international cinema. My training in literary studies informs my study of cinema. Close reading, archival research, and attention to cultural and historical contexts are key aspects of my approach.
My first book, The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema is in production and will be published by Indiana University Press in Spring 2024. The Ethnographic Optic takes a provocative approach to 1960s French cinema, reframing canonical fictions and documentaries in relation to the evolution of visual ethnography in the twilight of French colonialism. It highlights the shift in the work of three notable filmmakers—Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais—from a sophisticated engagement with otherness to a self-aware ethnographic focus on urban France. At a broader level, the book underlines the historical, formal, and thematic significance of French colonial, visual ethnography in 1960s French films produced in this period, as well as their New Wave and cinéma vérité contexts. This project has been awarded the Phi Beta Kappa Mary Isabel Sibley Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship.
I have published scholarly articles in Studies in French Cinema and in the edited collection Dans le sillage de Jean Rouch (Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme). Other writing and translations have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Romanic Review, and KinoKultura.
I am developing two new research projects. The first reframes the origins of Francophone sub-Saharan African cinema through an archival contextualization of two key films of the 1950s. The second examines the post-World War II intersections of the domestic French ethnographic tradition, French cinema, and television. This project has been awarded a Fall 2023 research residency at the Institute for Advanced Study Aix-Marseille (IMéRA) and at the Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (Mucem).