What can a 'film' do, and how?
As a feminist film and screen studies writer-teacher-theorist, I stress ethical-political post-cinematic potentials, and I celebrate moving images that testify to contemporary lived experiences. My focus on screen images explores how the cinema does not mimic or represent but directly affects and affronts as it attempts to convey what defies straightforward representation.
As the first in my immediate and extended working-class immigrant family to pursue postgraduate studies (1st gen.) in Canada, and as a woman whose beliefs and trajectories diverge from the ‘norms’ of the culture in which I was born, I attempt to accommodate and listen to all students. My courses maintain a strong focus on feminist, female and intersectional approaches. Past, current and future offerings include 'feminist ecocinema;' 'disability onscreen;' 'political art and cinema;' 'screen ethics and affect;' 'transnational and experimental cinemas;' 'evocations of cultural trauma and memory;' 'post-cinematic media.' We consider politics of filmmaking, transnationalism, exile and diaspora; gender politics (nonhuman, crip, trans, non-binary & queer readings); race and class analyses; and ecocinema with works by several women, nonwestern, queer, trans, non-binary, brown and black filmmakers. Our screenings and readings foreground experiences of grief, kinship, care and survival.
I am an advanced tenure-track Assistant Professor of Film Studies (2023 Interim Director) in the Department of Visual & Performing Arts (VAPA) at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Until August 2022, I was Assistant Professor of Audiovisual Cultures & the Moving Image in the Institute for Media & Cultural Studies, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, and Guest Lecturer at the University of Cologne (Departments of American Literary and Cultural Studies, and Romance Studies). After obtaining my PhD in Film-Philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Department of French, Newnham College), I held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Edinburgh (Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities), Brown University (Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women), and the University of New South Wales (Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia). From 2016-19, I was Senior Lecturer (permanent Associate Professor) in Film at Falmouth University (UK), before moving to the University of Cologne in 2019, where I was a 2018-19 Research Fellow at the Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies (Käte Hamburger Center for Excellence), and in NYC, an August-October 2018 Visiting Fellow at Parsons New School for Design (Center for Transformative Media, director, Edward Keller). Prior to my PhD, I was a 2009-10 University of Aberdeen Predoctoral Film Teaching Fellow. I completed my Honours BA in English and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto, and MA in Theoretical, Critical, Historical Film and Media Studies at York University Canada.
Recent peer-reviewed works (2018-2022) appear in
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The Sustainable Legacy of Agnès Varda: Feminist Practice and Pedagogy (April 2022, Bloomsbury);
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Camera Obscura (May 2021, #106, Duke University Press), ‘Future Varda';
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Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies (Peter Lang, 2020);
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Studies in European Cinema (2019);
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“Materialising Absence in Film and Media” (co-edited with Saige Walton for Screening the Past, 2018);
Alongside a return to audiovisual essay work, two monographs are in-progress: Little Women (2019): Movies Minute by Minute (2024, celebrating female authorship and feminist queer resistance for Nicholas Rombes & Nadine Boljkovac's Bloomsbury book series, Timecodes), and Herself: Feminist Ecocinema and Moving Image Portraiture. A transdisciplinary book collection (co-edited with Hanjo Berressem) is also in-progress which is inspired by the spatial and visual concept of a triptych as expressed in practice and philosophy.
My first monograph, Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema (2013; paperback 2015), is the 14th title in the Edinburgh University Press philosophy book series, Plateaus: New Directions in Deleuze Studies, and the series’ first art-based transdisciplinary book. Dedicated to questions of affect, suffering and survival, history and memory, Untimely Affects examines cinematic retellings of events, including the Holocaust and Hiroshima, through works by multimedia artists/ciné-poets/documentarians Chris Marker and Alain Resnais in dialogue with the poststructuralist thoughts of Deleuze as well as Roland Barthes, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Rancière, and others. (Reviewed by Özgür Çiçek for Film-Philosophy [20: 2-3, 2016]; Colin Gardner for Deleuze Studies [9:2, 264-272, 2015].)