Teaching

I have over half a decade of experience teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the areas of Film Studies, French, and Cultural Studies. In recent years, I’ve designed and delivered the following courses:

Topics in European Cinema: Gender & Sexuality in French Cinema

(King’s College London, Masters)

In the introduction to their series on French film directors, Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram write that “to an anglophone audience, the combination of the words “French” and “cinema” evokes a particular kind of film: elegant and wordy, sexy but serious.” While they are admittedly speaking in broad terms, Holmes and Ingram’s words point to a remarkably persistent set of affinities and generative associations between ideas of gender, sexuality and French cinema, especially as these terms circulate within a broader cinephile imaginary. What role has French cinema historically played in shaping discourses of gender and sexuality in European screen cultures? And how have recent filmmakers used screen media to reflect on contemporary fault line issues surrounding gender non-conformity, queer rights, and racial occlusions? In this course, gender and sexuality will serve as key themes and analytic prisms through which to consider a range of French films from the 1920s to the present day. Though our approach will be more conceptual than historical, this course will span a range of genres and periods, from early silent experiments in queer cinepoetics to the mid-century tradition of the Nouvelle Vague and onward to the New French Extremity and “banlieue” films that have proliferated since the 2000s. Each seminar will present the opportunity to deepen and consolidate students’ understandings of key topics in film theory (including embodiment; ethics; documentary; stardom), and to bring these ideas into conversation with striking cinematic examples. For students interested in subjects such as sex work, transgender representation, and the intersections of race and gender, there will be ample opportunity address these ideas by engaging with cutting edge voices in queer theory, feminist thought, critical race studies, and cognate fields. This course engages with work by Claire Denis, Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, Alice Diop, Germaine Dulac, Jean Genet, Jean-Luc Godard, Hervé Guibert, Michael Haneke, Christophe Honoré, and Sébastien Lifshitz, and Agnès Varda.

Film and Architecture

(Anglia Ruskin University, Undergraduate)

When we watch or write about films, settings often go unremarked upon. As if to mirror the spatial arrangement of the cinematic frame itself, the built environment in which a given scene transpires is often relegated to the background of our thinking; rooms, buildings, and settings are ancillary to more pressing concerns about human relations and narrative action. While we are not always accustomed to paying attention to the interior spaces that we inhabit when watching movies, this class will explore how architecture shapes cinematic narratives in ways that can be both striking and subtle. In this course, will explore film through the lens of architecture. Across a ten-week period we will consider a variety of dwelling spaces (e.g. houses, apartments, hotels and motels), sites of leisure and consumption (the movie theatre, the club, the mall), and forms of social organisation (the prison, the factory, and the museum) to come to a deeper appreciation of the role that architecture plays in propping up film’s plots and aesthetics. Students will encounter cinematic objects spanning a range of genres and forms, from art cinema to teen horror, from Lumière actualities to YouTube clips. In our sessions, we will ask such wide-ranging questions as: how have directors tried to capture the interplay between light, sound, and bodies in cinematic club scenes? When a camera enters into prison is there a risk it further fixes or captures the incarcerated body, or might prison cinema serve as a tool for freedom, abolition, and political critique? And what might the trope of the haunted house reveal to us about anxieties surrounding private property and intergenerational inheritance? This class uses building type as its core organising principle, thereby breaking with conventions of genre and periodicity, and bringing unlikely film objects into close proximity. By paying attention to the ideological coordinates of varied spaces, places, and institutions, students will come into contact with exciting works of cultural and critical theory, as well as honing their skills of close formal analysis. This course is likely to include work by Claire Denis, Harun Farocki, Alfred Hitchcock, Jim Jarmusch, Jessica Kingdon, Helene Klodawsky, Albert and David Maysles, Tsai Ming-liang, and Alain Resnais.

Documentary Film Theory

(Anglia Ruskin University, Undergraduate)

This course introduces students to the key critical discussions and debates surrounding the historical, technological, aesthetic and socio-political developments of documentary filmmaking. As well as drawing attention to the history of this important genre, the course responds to the renewed public interest in documentary film and its crossover into the mainstream by engaging with up-to-date commercial and critical hits. The seminar sessions will focus on the nature, specificity, and evolution of the documentary form, and its relationship to cinematic realism. Students are asked to consider the historical and theoretical contexts of the study of documentary film, as well as an engage with topical debates regarding the relationship between reality and representation, ethics and consent, and the historical role of anthropology and ethnography in the elaboration of a documentary mode of address. Across this ten week course, students will look at documentaries produced by Waad Al-Kateab, Gabriela Cowperthwaite, Robert Flaherty, Jenni Livingstone, Errol Morris, Alain Resnais, Gianfranco Rosi, and Agnès Varda, among others.

Spaces of Queer Cinema

(University of Cambridge, Postgraduate)

From early accounts of cinema that privileged the medium’s affinities with architecture to contemporary work on the geopolitics of film’s circulation and exhibition, the question of space has been a central concern in film theory. Cinematic space, however, is a slippery concept with no commonly agreed upon definition. More than a straightforward synonym for a film’s setting or geographic referent, scholars are increasingly using the term cinematic space to describe the complex relations between the profilmic image and off-screen space, between cinematic landscape and soundscape, between narrative space and the sites of cinema’s reception (—including both the architecture of the film theatre and the bodies that populate it). The aim of this course is to think through the multiple facets cinematic space as a way of offering a more expansive account of queer cinema. Looking beyond a representational paradigm focused on the onscreen politics of sexual identity, we will turn our attention to broader themes of embodiment, space and materiality. In this course we will consider a range of questions, including: How have histories of censorship delimited the field of vision? (And how have queer spectators negotiated their relation to these image economies?); How do queer filmmakers articulate questions of privacy, publicity, sexual visibility and disclosure in formal terms?; And how might a spatial approach to queer cinema yield new insights into a range of topics, from subcultural sexual practices to processes of urban gentrification, and from the rural/urban fault line in queer representation to the politics of sexuality in an uneven global frame? In this course, students will be asked to engage with a broad spectrum of cinematic objects—from America and France to Sweden and Taiwan—and readings will be drawn from a range of fields including film studies, queer theory and spatial thought.

Critical Theory

(University of Cambridge, Undergraduate)

With two fellow graduate students in 2019, I set up an optional Critical Theory course which ran across all three years of the undergraduate degree. (We are delighted to learn that it continues to run to this day!) Each session was focused on a key text or a number of short texts that speak to a common theme. Given that the European Languages degree at Cambridge comprise both modern and medieval languages, the course was attentive to questions of anachronism—in particular, thinking about the applicability of (primarily modern) theoretical paradigms to medieval and early modern literary texts and cultural objects. To this end, students were purposefully exposed to literary and aesthetic theory that predates “critical theory” as an academic designation (e.g. Aristotle’s Poetics; Boileau’s L’Art Poétique; Kantian aesthetics). When designing the course, we aimed for parity in terms of gender (half of the texts the syllabus are written by women, queer, and non-binary thinkers) while also making sure that questions of race, sexuality, and forms of non-normative embodiment are treated both sensitively and substantively. We wanted this course to feel both practical and concrete, but also speculative and theoretically expansive, and it was delivered in a teaching context that was relatively informal while maintaining a commitment to intellectual seriousness. In this course, students encountered the work of thinkers such as Erika Balsom, Roland Barthes, André Bazin, Jane Bennett, Lauren Berlant, Nicolas Boileau, Pierre Bourdieu, and Judith Butler (—to stay only on the letter “B”).

In addition to this, I have run a core postgraduate course on film theory titled Theorising Moving Images with Dr Kareem Estefan, convened a final year undergraduate course titled Cinema and the Political, and delivered lectures and seminars for the following courses:

• Introduction to French Literature, Linguistics, Film and Thought (UG)
• Ethics and experience: literature, thought, and visual culture of the French-speaking world (1900 to the present (UG)
• Translation from French to English (UG)
• Introduction to European Cinema (UG)
• Moving Image outside the Cinema (PG)
• Queer Cinema: Theories, Aesthetics, Politics (PG)