Main areas of interest

• The audio-visual arts, especially cinema, short film, installation art and documentary, with a focus on France and the Francophone world.
• Experimental film and listening practices 
• Film sound, sound design and musicology 
• Gender and sexuality studies

Current research projects

Most recently, I have published an article in Screen that offers a comparative study of lesbian representation and listening in two Lebanese films: the 2007 romantic comedy/drama Sukkar banat/Caramel by Nadine Labaki, and the 2018 experimental short film Three Centimetres by Lara Zeidan. I have also acted as academic advisor for an entry on the Belgian filmmaker, writer and video artist Chantal Akerman in Contemporary Literary Criticism. 

In 2023, I was awarded a Faculty Research Fellowship, which has enabled me to work on a book I am writing about listening and the face-to-face encounter in documentaries from the Francophone world. As part of this research, I have completed two collaborative projects with filmmakers: a special conversation, in English and French, with the documentary filmmaker Katy Léna Ndiaye, accompanied by the essay 'Collaborative Listening, Collaborative Pedagogy' in Screen Worlds: Decolonising Film and Screen Studies, and an interview and collaboration with the Lebanese filmmaker Corine Shawi in Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies.

Moreover, part of my book includes chapters on works by Chantal Akerman. During the research process, I have published peer-reviewed articles in MIRAJ, French Screen Studies, and Paragraph and given talks and participated in discussions on some of Akerman's lesser-known documentaries, short films and installation art works, as well as on her musical collaboration with the cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton. I have also published a book chapter on Akerman’s documentary De l’autre côté, shot on the US-Mexico border, in Chantal Akerman: Afterlives (Legenda, 2019, co-edited by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson). 

Past research projects

My first monograph, entitled Godard and Sound: Acoustic Innovation in the Late Films of Jean-Luc Godard (I.B.Tauris, 2017), re-evaluates the multimedia work of the Swiss-French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard from an auditory perspective, expanding current typologies of film sound and prompting new debates about the relationship between sound, the moving image, and the film spectator. This book was based on my PhD thesis and it came out in paperback with Bloomsbury in 2020. 

In 2014, I received the Susan Hayward Prize by the Association for Studies in French Cinema, and in 2012 I was awarded the R.H. Gapper Postgraduate Essay Prize by the Society for French Studies for my work on Godard's cinema. Prior to this, in 2007, I won Joint runner-up in the R.H. Gapper Undergraduate Essay competition, run by the Society for French Studies, for an essay on three novels by Marguerite Duras. This was published in 2008 as the short article 'Writing the Rhythms of Desire: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, L’Amour and L’Amant' in French Studies Bulletin, A Quarterly Supplement.  

PhD and MA supervision

I co-supervise theory and practice-based PhD and MPhil theses on a range of subjects, including:

• Sound in Chantal Akerman's cinema
• The documentary practice of Trinh T. Minh-ha
• Female disability and the senses in libertine literature
• Subjectivity and sensory experience in letters by the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire

I have also supervised MA dissertations on a broad range of topics including: the ethics of Trinh T. Minh-ha's theory and film; Sinophone lesbian cinema; screening female heroines; female corporeal experiences in English-language translations of Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical works.

Administrative roles

I have acted as Director of Teaching in French, Postgraduate Teaching Officer for the School of Modern Languages, and Interim Programme Director for the Faculty of Arts' MA Black Humanities (cover for a staff member on leave).

Background

Before joining Bristol, I completed my BA degree in French with Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, followed by an MA by Research on the cinema of Marguerite Duras. I later completed my PhD at Royal Holloway on the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard before taking up a postdoctoral Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. I have also completed HEA Fellowship schemes at Bristol and Royal Holloway and I am Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.