About
I am a literary and visual culture scholar, whose research spans the fields of memory studies, performance studies, visual culture, and 20th and 21st century global literatures.
My dissertation, Feeling in Public, examines the political and performative stakes of witnessing, discovering how contemporary visual media innovates or exacerbates problems of representation and structures of spectatorship in texts, memorials, monuments, and performances responding to historical violence. My work brings together memory studies and visual culture to contend that an act of bearing witness is always simultaneously a performance of bearing witness. Reading works by Samuel Beckett, Susan Sontag, Jordan Wolfson, Joshua Oppenheimer, Claude Lanzmann, Kirsten Johnson, Anne C. Bailey, and Dannielle Bowman, I argue that the co-constitutive powers of memory and performance employed by these writers and artists experiment with form to represent the dangers of a too-easy intimacy, the limitations of the gaze, and the creative possibilities of failure and mis-performance.
Fields of Study: visual culture, memory studies, performance studies, trauma studies, critical theory, 20th and 21st century literature
